Diverse Perspectives on Precolonial Maya Human Remains and the Foreigners who Study Them

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ethical Dilemmas in the Study and Care of Human Remains beyond North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ethics surrounding the study of the skeletal remains of the “ancient Maya” are fraught and variable. For much of the second millennium AD, large swaths of the southern Maya lowlands were sparsely occupied by indigenous peoples, with population booms spurred by internal migration only in recent decades. Thus, relevant stakeholders are diverse, including descendant communities, non-descendant communities, and modern nation-states with varying laws and standards. Local stakeholders also have diverse priorities owing to variable economic resources, political organizations, and land ownership rights, while precolonial ruins may be viewed as belonging to non-ancestral others, whether the semi-supernatural “ancient Maya,” the Aztecs, or the gods. Even the term “Maya” is not necessarily an identity to which Indigenous people of the region subscribe outside the Yucatan. A common thread, however, is the perceived financial potential of ruined places and concerns over the extractive nature of archaeology. Archaeologists are generally understood as foreigners, a moral category encompassing international researchers as well as national archaeologists in Mexico and Guatemala, who predominately do not identify as Indigenous and live and study in distant urban centers. Our discussion centers on our own experiences working with communities in rural Chiapas and at Maya centers in Peten, Guatemala.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ethical Dilemmas in the Study and Care of Human Remains beyond North America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 54112