The Archaeology of Archives: Exploring Historical Maps through Connections between ArcGIS and Community Oral Histories

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This project is a collaboration between the Texas Heritage Project (THP) and its archive at the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions (AITSCM) and the Community Engaged Digital Scholarship Hub (CEDISH) at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in San Antonio, Texas. We are taking a community-based archaeological approach to a map collection stored within the grassroots Indigenous organization and its community archive. As part of this pilot project, we collaboratively determined with AITSCM to implement the Content Management System (CMS) Mukurtu as it best suits the needs of the organization and its community members. In addition to content management, we use ArcGIS to georeference the maps to archive changes in land tenure and the presence of Indigenous-built acequias, documenting their impact on the formation of San Antonio and its diverse communities. This mapping project works to accomplish the following: 1) center the community and their expertise while connecting their oral histories to historical documents; 2) offer students training for post-graduation success using software like ArcGIS and digital archiving platforms; and 3) improve the sustainability of the archive and increase access to its materials, and all it’s community-determined iterations, through platforms such as StoryMaps.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53652