Local Politics, Money, and Power: Navigating Archaeological Heritage in the Peruvian Highlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Dynamics of Heritage Values in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There are millions of rural, Quechua-speaking peoples living today in the modern nation of Peru. However, living populations do not always self-identify as descendants of the ancient communities that archaeologists study. There are complex reasons for this apparent disjuncture between ancient and contemporary peoples, some of which include social stigmas against Indian identities; Peru’s distinct political trajectory in cultural heritage management; and the reality of prehispanic and modern migrations, which have displaced ethnic groups from their places of origin. In this talk, I present a case study from an archaeological project that I directed in Huancavelica, Peru, to explore some of the complexities of navigating heritage decisions in the Andes. I demonstrate that stakeholder attitudes can be both contradictory and evolving, and that local power struggles come to bear heavily on these negotiations. Finally, I argue that to become better allies of living Andean communities, archaeologists must be sensitive to their true needs and remain flexible as they set the agenda, rather than following models of community archaeology derived from North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Dynamics of Heritage Values in the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33058