Journal article
Tomás Gallareta Cervera,
The Mayanist, vol. 3(1), 2021
The Mayanist, vol. 3(1), 2021
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APA
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Documenting the Brigades: Oral History of Local Archaeology Experts in the Puuc Region, Yucatán, México. . (2021). The Mayanist, 3(1).
Chicago/Turabian
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“Documenting the Brigades: Oral History of Local Archaeology Experts in the Puuc Region, Yucatán, México. .” The Mayanist 3, no. 1 (2021).
MLA
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“Documenting the Brigades: Oral History of Local Archaeology Experts in the Puuc Region, Yucatán, México. .” The Mayanist, vol. 3, no. 1, 2021.
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@article{gallareta2021a,
title = {Documenting the Brigades: Oral History of Local Archaeology Experts in the Puuc Region, Yucatán, México. },
year = {2021},
issue = {1},
journal = {The Mayanist},
volume = {3},
author = {}
}
Places are always in transit, in the process of becoming. People consis- tently create, erase, and change the meanings of their landscapes. In her now-classic 1995 book Living with the Ancestors, Patricia McAnany argues that ancient Maya ancestors are markers of places for both elite and non-elite populations and acted as a text-free genealogy of place. However, a long and violent colonization process effectively distanced indigenous peoples’ cultural links to ancestral archaeological sites. Furthermore, McAnany warned us that only a few indigenous Americans are included in the process of archaeological research, making the practice potentially an unwelcome guise and “an instrument of domination.” She proposed community engagement as a way forward out of the colonial past. Indeed, contemporary Maya populations connect with their ancestral land and rural lifeways regardless of archaeological narratives. Oral history is a method that bridges archaeological and local understandings of rural landscapes. Since 2018, faculty and students from Kenyon College have collected oral histories from local workers who engage with archaeological sites. The brigadores (i.e., brigades), constituted of indigenous farmers turned professional excavators, masons, and custodians, have interacted with Yucatan’s Puuc landscape for generations, building a deep well of knowledge about the archaeoscape. In this article, I discuss the preliminary results of our project, Voices of the Puuc Angels: Rural Life among the Archaeological Ruins of the Yucatan Peninsula, which documents the brigadores’ narratives about rural lifeways in Yucatán and their relationship to the ancestral archaeological past.
