Dynamic Heritage as a Path to Collaborative Knowledge Production in Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The focus of archaeological work has shifted in recent decades to collaborative frameworks that allow for sharing of knowledge production among local and descendent communities. Drawing on the work of Laurajane Smith, we argue that recognizing heritage as a dynamic social process rather than exclusively an artifact or archaeological site is an important element of shared knowledge production or democratizing heritage. The perspective of heritage as a process moves beyond conventional understandings of archaeological sites as static remnants of past activities and instead highlights how sites hold diverse meanings in the present. Drawing on the use of oral histories to investigate a church in Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico, as a case study, this paper demonstrates how previous approaches to colonial architecture, which interpret colonial buildings as temporally inert remnants of colonial powers, contradict local understandings of these structures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38307.0