Working/Touring the Past: Latin American Identity and the Political Frustration of Heritage

This article explores the pervasive impact of the pre-Hispanic past on contemporary Latin American identity, using the Ecuadorian Indian movement and the Yucatacan town of Izamal as two symbolic sites where many of these factors vie for official recognition. Therefore, the central topic of this article is also an essential element of the debate contained within the global development discourse: How is it possible for Latin American to face the constant onslaught of powerful North America and European iconic images and not in some way embody its own inherent internalized forms of colonial oppression?     

Issues on the Diversity and Emergence of Middle-Range Societies of the Ancient Caribbean: A Critique

Caribbean archaeology traditionally has focused on culture history and migrations while social and political issues have been mostly ignored. Recent studies, however, have begun to overcome these deficiencies by paying more attention to some of the intangible aspects of prehistoric groups and by improving field methodology to gather the appropriate data. In general, sociopolitical organizations in the pre-Hispanic Caribbean were both spatially and temporally diverse. Nevertheless, despite advancements in data collection, analyses have been hindered by the use of improper analytical units and scales of analysis, as well as our overreliance on historical data for the reconstruction of social and political organizations. These methodological problems have (1) hidden the variability present in the archaeological record and (2) limited our explanatory potential and understanding of past societies in the Caribbean.     

Cultural Imperialism and Heritage Politics in the Event of Armed Conflict: Prospects for an ‘Activist Archaeology’

The production of archaeological knowledge is embedded in a long-standing tradition of colonial encounters. This paper asks how political-economic interests impinge on archaeological work, specifically in the event of armed conflict. To answer this question I discuss commodification of cultural heritage and analyze it as a form of structural violence. I argue that the attitude that allows treatment of archaeological artifacts as saleable items with international owners is part of a strategy of global cultural imperialism. Exemplified by the case of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, this paper shows how the clash of global ‘heritage’ politics with local practices of memorializing the past results in a tension: because capitalist governments consider the locales whose glorious pasts are studied by archaeologists to be culturally inferior, the nexus between (trans-)national actors and local communities is an asymmetrical one. In order to overcome the hegemonic role of archaeology within these dynamics, I propose an ‘activist archaeology’ that enables a political activism grounded in recursivity.     

Framing the past: situating the archaeological in photographs

Archaeology continually reproduces its own images. Speaking archaeology’s visual language is one way we prove membership in the discipline. Many aspects of this visual language have become so naturalized within archaeological representation as to be almost unquestionable: the cleaning of the site, the use of scale, and particular framings and perspectives. How, then, is the production of particular photographic images of archaeology related to the practice of archaeology? Does archaeology look a certain way (in photographs) or are archaeologists reproducing an archaeology according to the way it is thought it should look? Using examples of early photographs from Latin American archaeological expeditions, this article investigates not only photography as an applied technology for scientific recording, but also its power to situate archaeological knowledge. Drawing on recent reflective and critical developments in both the history of archaeology and visual anthropology, it uses five focal points – trace, objectivity and authenticity, sight/site, still lifes, and still lives – to argue that early-twentieth-century archaeological photographs of Latin America participated in the generation of an ‘authentic’ past rather than simply paid testament to it.     

Late Holocene subsistence and social integration in Sierras of Córdoba (Argentina): the South-American ostrich eggshells evidence

Zooarchaeological research carried out on South-American ostrich eggshells from late pre-Hispanic site Arroyo Talainín 2 (ca. 1100–300 BP, Sierras of Córdoba, Argentina) is presented in this paper. The resource importance has been assessed focusing mainly on its economic and political dimensions for social-unit integration rather than its classical use as a seasonal indicator. Eggshells taxonomic identification was performed by quantifying shell-pore density, and determining two Rheidae species: greater rhea (Rhea americana) and lesser rhea (Rhea pennata). High frequencies of burned eggshell fragments indicate an unequivocal association between this resource and the human occupations recorded at this site. Regional-scale data suggests that egg consumption took place disassociated from the main-residential camps. These locations were rock-shelters occupied by small-dispersed household groups or large-group food processing and consumption sites such as Arroyo Talainín 2. Thus, a flexible approach for a food-consumption study is required to account for its spatial dimension. Only a regional-scale archaeological research will allow advances to be made in our understanding of the subsistence patterns and socio-political organization of late pre-Hispanic human societies.     

Cocoons as a space of their own: a case of Emirati women learners

This article focuses on ‘cocooning’ as a spatial practice of Emirati higher education women learners in a single-sex learning context, which emerged from exploring the intersectional and intertwined relationship of gender, place and culture with its unique cultural formation that informs women learners’ spatiality. To understand women’s spatiality and explore these intersecting relations, I conducted an ethnographic qualitative inquiry, applying multiple levels of data gathering and analysis. I also utilised social theories of space as a theoretical framework, specifically the social construction of space and Lefebvre’s triad of perceived, conceived and lived space. Cocooning, represented in these women learners’ unique spatial appropriation in their quest for a space of their own, emerged as a pervasive socially constructed spatial theme. As a spatial practice, it was largely influenced by the women learners’ cultural model, including socio-cultural status and gender roles, rooted in their national, historical colonial and traditional past as well as current economic, political, demographic, academic-institutional and global positions and demands. Furthermore, cocooning is a spatial representation of what also seems a universal longing among women, beyond context and culture, for a space of one’s own. Such a spatial need is manifested differently in the perceived space while shared in the conceived and lived.     

Ritual practices and collective consumption of animal products at the Iron Age rural settlement of Mas Castellar de Pontós (Girona,Spain) (5th–4th centuries BC)

Abstract

Animals have played an important role in certain ceremonies or rites in the past. During such activities, animals may have been alive, dead or been used as raw material. The disposal of detritus from these practices can lead to the formation of faunal assemblages with a particular taxonomic and anatomic composition. At the Iron Age ‘Mas Castellar de Pontós’ site (Girona, Spain), associations of archaeological materials excavated from Pit feature FS362 were suggestive of deposits arising from collective ceremonial consumption. Analysis of the 1309 mammal remains recovered from this feature is used to determine the nature and dynamics of the ceremony. At the same time, the relationship of these faunal remains with the other archaeological materials recovered in the pit will allow light to be shed on the significance and importance of these ceremonies in the framework of the social and political relations that governed the life of the inhabitants of this settlement.     

From Head‐hunter to Organ‐thief: Verisimilitude,Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond

In the last few years, occult head‐hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head‐hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims’ organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols head‐hunters in a contemporary and global ‘travelling package’ that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a ‘more‐than‐representational’ approach to the organ‐stealing head‐hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co‐producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of ‘the occult’ more generally.     

Constructing Indigenous Subjectivities: Economic Collectivism and Identity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article uses a governmentality analytic to understand the efforts of indigenous leaders from the Ecuadorian Amazon to shape their organizations’ members over the past four decades, particularly efforts to promote collective engagement in market‐oriented activities. A close examination of one organization's history reveals that leaders’ subjectivity‐shaping efforts have been strongly influenced by collaborations with the state, NGOs and others. They have also been shaped by historical understandings of status and leadership. However, collaborative economic projects are also used by leaders as a tool for producing new kinds of indigenous citizens, ones that are actively engaged with larger communities of indigenous people beyond their kinship groups. Leaders see these new senses of citizenship as empowering, and as a critical precursor to planning land use and livelihoods. Thus, indigenous leaders are not simply conduits for the subjectivity‐shaping projects of the state and international development groups; nor are they simply acting in their own interest. Rather, they constitute and regulate new types of citizens to ensure the future viability of their organizations and political projects.     

Complicating the Local: Defining the Aymara at Tiwanaku, Bolivia

The archaeological site of Tiwanaku, Bolivia, is commonly held to be the “Spiritual Capital of the Aymara People.” But negotiating who qualifies as Aymara, and in what contexts, is decidedly more complicated. Local political divisions between residents of the village of Tiahuanacu (who are seen locally as less-Aymara but not as not-Aymara) and residents of the surrounding rural communities (who are considered to be unquestionably Aymara) structure discussions about who has the right to earn income at the Tiwanaku archaeological site, who manages major public events, and who is responsible for the site’s maintenance and security. The situation is complicated further by national-level events such as the Winter Solstice, where urban Aymara travel to Tiwanaku to seek their roots, and Bolivian Presidents and politicians come to participate in national Aymara “culture.” I focus on the intervención (“Intervention”) that took place in Tiahuanacu in August 2000, which resulted in the transfer of management of the Tiwanaku archaeological site from the Bolivian state to local municipal and indigenous authorities. Heritage researchers should take such local divisions into account, rather than assuming that “locals” are politically unified or easily delineated by geographical boundaries.     

Talking about others: archaeologists,indigenous peoples and heritage in Argentina

Abstract

In the process of creating the Argentinean nation, the indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands and their sacred sites. The indigenous past was therefore neglected in a nation that was thought to be formed by European immigrants. As a result, pre-Hispanic heritage was considered part of the public domain of the State and a subject of scientific enquiry. In the last few decades, legal and political changes have encouraged indigenous peoples' claims on heritage issues. The aim of this paper is to analyse a number of contested heritage issues in which indigenous communities were involved, as well as a few examples in which archaeologists, authorities and indigenous groups have succeeded in building a dialogue regarding the care of specific archaeological sites. These issues are further discussed in the context of the current socio-political and economic crisis in Argentina.     

Localizing the Different Faces of Archaeological Landscapes in South India

Siruthavoor is a village situated 40?km south of Chennai in south India. The people of this village share their landscape with archaeological remains of south India’s past, including Iron Age–Early Historic burials and medieval temples. As an archaeologist, having witnessed and been both an indirect and direct participant in the changing reactions, actions, and perceptions of the community towards these monuments, I use this paper to explore the implications we can draw from the interaction between archaeological landscapes and various actors, spanning a period of twelve years. In India, as in many other countries, archaeological landscapes, monuments, and objects face the possibility of alteration, conservation, preservation, or destruction. The factors involved in this, I argue, are specific to localized conscious and unconscious decision-making by people living around such archaeological sites. Delving deeper into these issues will help us understand these often seemingly inexplicable choices that imperil the continued presence of archaeological monuments in the contemporary landscape. The behind-the-scenes events that occur in the ‘field’ of archaeology often remain untold, and yet they hold a lot of information. Through this narrative, this paper explores some of the subjectivities that we need to acknowledge as academics.     

WHAT I BELIEVE: REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY AS RESEARCH FRAMEWORKS IN SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Research themes centering on human-environment interaction have a long history in the writings of Southeastern archaeologists. However, many of the past theoretical frameworks that center on the environment do not articulate well with concepts such as agency and history as mechanisms for understanding the past. Two exceptions to this are research agendas that incorporate concepts derived from both historical and political ecology. In this paper, I explore the overlap and complementarity of various concepts from both of these frameworks. I suggest that the melding of these concepts offers a more robust avenue to consider the environment in archaeological research, which also explicitly takes into consideration both agency and history. In closing, I consider why such a perspective might benefit archaeological research in the Southeast.     

Scottish Shire Elections: Preliminary Findings in Sheriff Court Books

Historians of the Scottish parliament have paid little attention to shire elections because of an apparent lack of local source material. This article explores some of the reasons for this perception and argues that sheriff court records contain considerably more evidence than has been appreciated hitherto. It demonstrates that these records provide details of the electoral process, the regularity of elections, the numbers of electors, external interference in elections and internal divisions within the electorate, local responses to national political events, and attitudes to representation through such things as levying taxes locally to reimburse representatives’ expenses. It challenges the once widely‐held view that the lesser nobility, who comprised the electorate, were uninterested in parliamentary participation, suggesting instead that the statute of 1587, by which shire representation was established, was reasonably successful. Finally, it considers the potential for further research in these and other records which, it is argued, will provide a much deeper understanding of 17th‐century Scotland's parliamentary history in particular and political history in general.     

Materiality and Autonomy in the Pocumtuck Homeland

The Indigenous people of New England’s middle Connecticut River Valley are often imagined as having been subservient to powerful tribal nations elsewhere. Yet, archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence suggests Pocumtuck independence and autonomy in relations with neighboring Native groups and with Dutch, English, and French colonizers during the seventeenth century. We employ a decolonizing framework, drawing on H.M. Wobst’s critique of the preoccupation with dominance and geopolitical “centers” to analyze this evidence. By framing artifacts, colonial texts, and cultural interactions as both past and present “material interventions,” we can generate better understandings of Pocumtuck political autonomy, agency and identity.     

Domestic Spaces as Public Places: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study of Houses, Gender, and Politics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

In an ethnoarchaeological case study, we take a gendered perspective on the house as a locus of political life in Conambo, a village of about 200 Achuar- and Quichua-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this small-scale society, women and men engage actively in political practice in independent yet complementary ways, and the domestic context is a place where political life is conducted on a daily basis. In this article, the house is examined as a politicized context at three scales of materiality: the organization of settlement in the community, the spatial relationships in the house, and the scale of painted designs on pottery bowls used in the house. At each scale, we identify material correlates of women's and men's participation. Our goal is to bring attention to potential archaeological correlates of women's political involvement in past societies, to question assumptions about women's political lives and domestic spaces, and to expand the ways in which anthropological archaeology may contribute to understanding cross-cultural variation in women's and men's domains of power.     

Watching the city: the politics of space in Pizza,birra, faso

In this article, I discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis has as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts.     

A Decadence Baedeker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.     

Community Collaboration and Other Good Intentions

Collaborative and community-based archaeological research encompasses a broad spectrum of approaches; however, there are often discrepancies between how researchers ‘sell’ the collaborative endeavour in theory and how it is actually practised. Over the past several years, I have had the opportunity to participate in several projects, ranging from those that claimed to be ‘truly collaborative,’ to research that maybe should have asked, ‘what community?’ These experiences raised difficult and disturbing questions concerning the nature and practice of collaborative and community-based archaeology. In this paper, I confront these issues as I have experienced them personally. While community-based practices aim to redress a historical and ongoing power imbalance between the researcher and the researched, constant vigilance is required lest the ‘good intentions’ of anthropologists inadvertently mask an exploitation that may be inherent in the structure of research itself. In considering the corporate nature of academia, I query whether the collaborative research model represents a break with the past, or is instead simply the same old practice dressed up in fashionable new language.