Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendant Voices in the Excavations of a Historic Mission Church in Belen, New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

An engaged bioarchaeological project includes the Indigenous or descendant community from the beginning of the project, centers their questions, and brings forward their knowledge of the past to create more nuanced conversations about their ancestors. Shifting the focus from solely the goals of the anthropologist to a shared vision of recovering the past is a first step in decolonizing bioarchaeological practices. Our work, conducted at the request of descendant community members, aims to recover the lost history of the founding community of Belen, NM. Excavations revealed the location of the original mission church and resulted in the exhumation of some ancestors buried within and around the church. Our research intertwines descendants’ questions with bioarchaeological analyses to offer a deeper understanding of history and lived experiences in a frontier town, the intersections of sociopolitical processes of colonial conquest, and the erasure and resiliency of a community that continues to thrive into the twenty-first century. By engaging with these multiple lines of inquiry, we encounter a broader framework of restorative justice for those marginalized, assimilated, and vanished, while working toward recovery and reinstatement through the testimony of histories from both the ancestors and descendants that have been silenced through colonial practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38377.0