Transnational Labor in Maya Archaeology, 1910–1930

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Discussions of knowledge production and working conditions in archaeology increasingly draw scholarly attention to labor, as represented in recent work by Allison Mickel, Paul Everill, and others. For the most part, discussions of labor focus on the interpretative losses spurred by colonial relations of knowledge production and unfair working conditions, especially among locally-hired workers and in colonial contexts. However, institutions like the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Penn Museum, and others depended on the labor of transnational workers. I use recent archival research in the American Philosophical Society and the Carnegie Institution for Science to sketch out the origins, participation, and management of transnational workers in the Maya region. I conclude by arguing that understanding transnational labor in Maya archaeology during the early twentieth century enables a bottom-up understanding of the politics of archaeology in context, especially vis-à-vis race, export economies, and corporate imperialism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40452.0