Debating Oaxaca Historical Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

“Prehistory is passé” write Schmidt and Mrozowski in their 2013 essay "The Death of Prehistory," and this should definitely be the case for Oaxacan archaeology. But although most scholars would agree that Oaxaca may have seen the first literary civilization in the Americas, not all would subscribe to calling these people, or our reconstructions of them, "historical." In this presentation I will draw from Indigenous sources and genres to reframe the study of Oaxaca’s past under the paradigm of historical archaeology on the one hand, and “deep time history” on the other (following Schmidt and Mrozowski 2013). I will focus primarily on two case studies to illustrate my point, a past-to-present perspective that traces the millenary historical genre of “territorial-narratives,” and a present-to-past perspective that highlights Indigenous performative oral histories that encapsulate continuous colonial processes—Indigenous and European—on the Pacific coast. By shifting our archaeological gaze from the prehispanic/colonial dichotomy, this long-term approach to culture change and continuity further allows us to fully understand the impact of the Indigenous people on the formation of the so-called modern world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32715