Legally Nullius: How Colonial Discourses Underpinned Juridical Concepts Still Influencing Heritage Laws in Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this presentation, I argue that paganism-barbarism not only amalgamated colonial propaganda to portray the Maya Peoples as enemies of the crown for the sake of colonization but also served to legally disable any Maya who dared to claim their rights before the Spanish Crown. Such legal disabling allowed the dispossession of their ancestral territories, the disruption of their spiritual relations with the land, and the imposition of a model of anthropocentric domination of land that impacts even the modern states' laws. This presentation aims to engage in a critical conversation about the influence of such colonial legal relics on heritage practice in Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38204.0