Collaborative Archaeology, Mothering, and the "Intimate Labor" of Making Place

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 2022, I defended my dissertation on placemaking in two Alsatian colonies in 19th century Texas. Two months later, I had my daughter and learned how childbirth unmakes and remakes worlds, bodies, and relationships. Somewhere in (what felt like) the impossible gap between research and motherhood were the stories of mothers from my project, encountered amid fragments of data (Wilkie 2003). In this paper, I return to their stories to consider how placemaking itself is a form of “intimate labor” (Boris and Parreñas 2010), with mothering not at the margins but at the center. Drawing on archives, oral histories, and ruins, how might we remake space for/through mothers’ experiences – the relationships, movements, perils, joys, demands, corporeal realities of care? Following Searcy and Casteñeda (2020), I explore how making place and mothering are both collaborative projects of “intimate labor,” and how this shapes my collaborative work as an archaeologist.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow