Cultural Heritage, Human Rights, and Social Movements: An Insight into three Latin-American Archaeological Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Black and Indigenous Legacies of Resistance, Human Rights, and Archaeology in Latin America", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

International standards regulate cultural heritage, focusing historically on sites aligned with nation-building ideologies and systematically erasing other histories. Material heritage policies are shaped by constitutional amendments and policy shifts towards multiculturalism, aiming to empower non-dominant populations with human rights frameworks for active participation in national politics. However, Black, Indigenous, and Campesino (working-class people from predominantly rural environments) movements have remained critical of the failures of these policies to provide tangible solutions to their demands. Case studies in Colombia, Ecuador, and the Caribbean demonstrate the legislative history that informs archaeological sites of Black and Indigenous communities. Human rights violations are exacerbated by the neoliberal global crisis, disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations. Archaeology can involve political collaboration to protect ancestral sites, work with contemporary descendants, and situate research within Black and Indigenous socio-political frameworks. We outline how this has been implemented in the discipline and how communities can benefit directly from academic projects.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Landscapes of Black and Indigenous Legacies of Resistance, Human Rights, and Archaeology in Latin America   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow