Insights of Afro-Latin American Archaeology
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Insights of Afro-Latin American Archaeology Kathryn E. Sampeck 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract On September 15 and 16, 2017, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University hosted a workshop of 20 archaeologists from across the Americas and the Caribbean. Workshop proceedings demonstrate how a focus on Afro-Latin America challenges crucial concerns in archaeology. Likewise, workshop discussions showed the transformative contributions that archaeology makes to Afro-Latin American studies, including deeper understanding of the dynamics of African diaspora, racialization, colonialism, early modern economies, social hierarchies and slavery, consumerism, aesthetic interventions, and contemporary struggles for sovereignty. Keywords African diaspora . Race . Latin America . Colonialism . Slavery . Activism
Introduction Anniversaries invite reflecting upon the past to envision a better future. The year 2017 marks an important anniversary in the formation of Latin America and the development of relationships of capitalism, globalization, and modernity. Five hundred years ago, in 1517, the expedition of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba made a precarious first landing on the Mexican mainland, an initial step in a series of sustained endeavors to conquer, occupy, and control the American continents. This anniversary presents several fundamental challenges to archaeological method and theory. Historical archaeologists have devoted abundant attention to processes of colonialism at different times in different parts of the world, yet archaeological study of colonialism in Latin America is often silent about a persistent, pervasive, and crucial member in this encounter and shaper of the course of colonial ventures in the Caribbean and the American mainland: Africans and African creoles, people of African descent born outside of Africa. This silence is * Kathryn E. Sampeck [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois State University, Campus Box 4660, Normal, IL, USA
Int J Histor Archaeol
not unique to archaeology, but rather falls in line with some scholarship in other disciplines as well as contemporary struggles regarding visibility, political power, and social justice for peoples of African descent in Latin America. Archaeology, however, has the ability to see what some endeavored to conceal and find tangible evidence of unrecorded actions and presence. Both through planned, concerted efforts as well as accidental discoveries, the recent rise of the field of Afro-Latin American archaeology is proving to be remarkably rewarding, not just as a new and needed focus, but also as a way to interrogate basic premises in archaeological method and theory. A workshop September 15 and 16, 2017 hosted by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Fou
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