THE TEMPORAL LIVES OF PLACES: ARCHAEOLOGY, MEMORY AND HERITAGE IN MESOAMERICA AND NORTHWESTERN SOUTH AMERICA
Archaeological research in the Isthmo-Colombian Area and neighboring regions increasingly shows that places durably marked on the landscape retain their significance for human communities over long periods of time, spanning centuries and even millennia. However, in interpreting this long history, archaeology often draws on concepts such as continuity, permanence, monumentality and the durability of objects and their material properties. Although ethnohistorical and ethnographic studies have extensively explored how indigenous peoples conceive of their recent and deep pasts, including notions of ancestrality, persistence and memory, these perspectives still have a relatively limited presence in archaeological interpretation.
Archaeological interpretations of material persistence intersect in multiple ways with local conceptions of memory, ancestrality, history and place. Rather than assuming that objects and landscapes possess inherent temporal qualities, this symposium proposes to ask how durable materials acquire meaning through ongoing acts of remembrance, ritual practices, oral narration, care, reuse and transformation. What makes certain places, objects or landscapes remain meaningful across generations? How are continuity and rupture produced, negotiated or contested? And how would archaeological narratives change if indigenous conceptions of past, present and future were taken seriously as interpretive frameworks, rather than merely as complementary perspectives?
We invite contributions that examine the formation, negotiation or transformation of temporal meanings through the creation and maintenance of landscapes, memory sites, funerary contexts or depositional spaces. Unlike previous research that has treated archaeological materials as intrinsically bearing temporality, this symposium proposes to explore how archaeological chronologies dialogue with local histories, oral traditions, indigenous epistemologies and research carried out in collaboration with contemporary communities. For example, how should the repeated occupation of the same ceremonial center over several centuries be interpreted? In what ways can collaborative research among archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and local communities transform our current conceptions of time?
We welcome papers addressing these questions through case studies in Mesoamerica and the Isthmo-Colombian Area. Abstracts may address topics such as monuments and memory, ritual landscapes, object biographies, funerary contexts, chronology, cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge systems and community participation. Contributions from archaeology, anthropology, ethnohistory, heritage studies and research conducted by indigenous scholars are especially welcome.
The aim of this symposium is to promote a transregional perspective and a truly interdisciplinary conversation that generates new ways of considering the temporal lives of places and materials in indigenous communities, while offering a space for exchange among researchers from different regions and disciplines.
By bringing together specialists working from diverse traditions and geographic areas, this symposium seeks to explore how material traces endure not only because they physically survive, but also because people continually reactivate, reinterpret, maintain and mobilize them in the present.
