Pomp and Circumstance Before Belize: Ancient Maya Commerce and the New River Conurbation

Copyright 2008 of The National Academy of Sciences

Practicing Archaeology - As If It Really Matters

People care about archaeology for a variety of competing reasons. Archaeologists no longer ignore this as they once did, but few have come to terms on a pragmatic level with their responsibility to the public. Here I outline my own ideas about public engagement and the place of ethnography in the archaeologist’s professional practice. While long-term collaborations between archaeologists and others are almost always preferable, they are rarely feasible, and lofty ideals can have negative repercussions for daily practice and political action. I advocate Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a method that archaeologists untrained in ethnography can use to expediently develop ethnographically sensitive and respectful relationships. I also advocate that archaeologists be honest about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it relates to what they are actually trained to do. This is an important step since archaeologists need to be able to see themselves as one group of stakeholders with a right to advocate their position, but no right to ultimate control of the resources that they use to create an archaeological record. PAR is structured to ensure that project outcomes are not determined in advance. This means that the perspectives and objectives of archaeologists, even when they are allied with political and economic power, will not always prevail. I conclude with a description of a current community museums project I am supporting in Kyrgyzstan where I have put as much energy into transparency as into ethnography

Shaken, Not Stirred: The Revolution in Archaeology

A generation of archaeologists has shown that gender stereotyping has impeded our ability to understand the political economy, social organization, and cultural changes that are reflected in archaeological data. But feminist archaeology has also shown that to understand the past we could not simply “add women and stir”; that researching gender would require interrogating a great deal of received wisdom and might ultimately challenge some of our most cherished anthropological and ethnographic categories. By studying gender in the past we were not trying to place women within the standard anthropological framework of understanding, we were trying to shake the framework. The important contributions to this volume come from some of the first young scholars to be born into that shaken framework; each providing new perspectives, new interpretations, and new insights into the lives of ancient people that expand not only what we perceive about the past, but also what we can understand about ourselves

Introduction: Toward an Engaged Feminist Heritage Praxis

We advocate a feminist approach to archaeological heritage work in order to transform heritage practice and the production of archaeological knowledge. We use an engaged feminist standpoint and situate intersubjectivity and intersectionality as critical components of this practice. An engaged feminist approach to heritage work allows the discipline to consider women’s, men’s, and gender non-conforming persons’ positions in the field, to reveal their contributions, to develop critical pedagogical approaches, and to rethink forms of representation. Throughout, we emphasize the intellectual labor of women of color, queer and gender non-conforming persons, and early white feminists in archaeology

Why Archaeology Must Be a Science

As relações antagônicas entre a ciência e a religião têm sido recorrentes ao longo de toda a História Ocidental. Os debates pós-modernos situam discordâncias diferenças cosmológicas entre povos nativos tradicionais e cientistas colonialistas e insensíveis. Esta dicotomia simplista paternaliza tanto os nativos quanto os arqueólogos. A busca por um denominador comum revela implicações éticas para o futuro dos nativos e para a arqueologia