Making It “Worthwhile” for All: Local Tourism, Archaeology, and Sierra de San Francisco Rock Art

Summary

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings are a hard to access archaeological site in Mexico’s Baja California Sur state. Visiting some of the largest of them requires traversing a canyon on muleback, two nights of camping, and taxing hikes, as well as hiring guides and coordinating with the local National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) authorities. The paintings themselves are understudied within the archaeological community, not claimed by any Indigenous group living in the state, and the local population, mostly economically vulnerable subsistence ranchers, have an even more distant, transactional relation to them. Guiding tourists to the cave paintings is one of the most coveted jobs for the community given the monetary relief it can provide, even as said tourism is relatively scarce, which protects the paintings themselves. Given such a tension, how might archaeology, tourism, and the local community interact with one another in a more mutually beneficial way?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• (Re) Imagining Rock Art Research

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51307