In this dissertation, I claim that collaborative research produces better data, interpretations, and ethical outcomes. I argue for an expanded toolkit of representational practices in anthropological archaeology. To do so, I compare how archaeological knowledge is created and becomes involved in contemporary land-use practices through two community-based research projects. The first, the Albany Bulb Archaeology Project (ABA), documented self-built homes at an Albany, CA public park after eviction in 2014. The second, the ongoing Berkeley-Abiquiú Collaborative Archaeology Project (BACA), surveyed and interpreted the historic acequia irrigation ditches that traverse the 18th century land grant community of El Pueblo de Abiquiú in northern New Mexico. Both projects investigate landscapes of inequality: spatial-temporal materialities forged by the phenomena of colonialism and capitalism in the last 400 years.

The landfill-turned-public-park known as the Albany Bulb is a landscape privileging use by an upper-middle class “public” over the home-making and care practices performed by people experiencing homelessness. Through an analysis of city documents and archaeological documentation, I deconstruct how urban development values a construction of “nature” over the realities of industrial history and contemporary homelessness. Creative interventions such as maps and photographs have emerged in response to the re- or even de-contextualization of this place as an “art park.” The presentation of these archaeological/artistic maps and photographs in an art gallery subsequently provides an opportunity to reflect on the effects of archaeological work on this contemporary issue.

El Pueblo de Abiquiú is a Genízaro Indio-Hispano community created by colonial Spanish practices of indentured servitude and relocation. Abiquiú’s story begins with colonial violence, displacement, and disenfranchisement. It continues to the present day, where movements for federal recognition and the adjudication of water rights pit Abiquiúceño resource and heritage management against the capitalistic mechanisms of the surrounding state and federal governments. I evaluate the impact of collaborative archaeological research on heritage revitalization and water rights with the Pueblo’s Genízaro residents. Using the concept of hydrosociality, I interpret the complex inter-relationship between people and water, governance and infra-structure, and past and present that make up acequias and their archaeological representations.

Building on the ethics of anthropological archaeological research and experimentation with art as a method for archaeological story-telling, I posit that socially engaged archaeology must use diverse strategies to not only communicate its narratives, but create them. This includes cultivating collaborative practices for research development, execution, and interpretation, as well as community-centered definitions of “success” and “meaning.” Different contexts present opportunities to change the terms of knowledge production and to achieve a critical “praxis” as proposed by calls for engaged research.

This dissertation is an archaeological and historical study of culture contact and colonialism at Conchagua Vieja, an indigenous village site on the Salvadoran island of Conchagüita, in the Gulf of Fonseca. Based on ethnohistorical research, Conchagua Vieja was inhabited by Lenca-speaking peoples at the time of Spanish contact in 1522. Conchagua Vieja was later abandoned at the turn of the seventeenth century because of pirate incursions into the area. The culture and lifeways of the indigenous peoples that resided on the island of Conchagüita, along with their multi-ethnic neighbors that inhabited the Gulf of Fonseca region, were irrevocably transformed by culture contact and colonization.

The events and processes of colonization and missionization created, and depended upon, complex new forms of interaction between and within groups of Mesoamerican Indians, Africans, Europeans, and mixed-race American-born colonial subjects. The dynamics of this entanglement between peoples of regional, ethnic, racial, and cultural distinctions are significant to any study of Central America. The research presented here investigates the multifaceted nature of cultural entanglements between European and indigenous peoples through archival research, archaeological survey and excavations, and laboratory analyses.

There are two primary objectives to this dissertation. First, shed light on a local experience on an island in the Gulf of Fonseca that addresses larger themes of colonialism and nationalism in El Salvador. In a country with arguably the weakest historiography in Latin America, the need to carry out such an extensive empirical research project could not be greater. Second, develop a nuanced social history of colonialism in El Salvador, one that explores how colonialism was differentially experienced on a variety of scales. Addressing the first goal complements archaeological research in Central America that has not dealt with the Gulf of Fonseca, an area that has received scant archaeological and historical attention. The second goal is important not only as the backdrop for a theoretical and methodological exercise, but also as an exploration of a noteworthy, but often overlooked, colonial venue in El Salvador and Central America. Illuminating the experiences of an indigenous community that did not include resident Spaniards further unveils the diversity of culture contact in Central America, providing new data for comparative work and revealing critical moments in indigenous histories along the Pacific coast of Central America.

The investigation brings together five bodies of data: (1) published and unpublished archival records related to the island of Conchagüita and the Gulf of Fonseca; (2) survey data that reveals patterns of indigenous landscape practices; (3) archaeological evidence of architectural practices in the Spanish church that was constructed in the middle of Conchagua Vieja at the turn of the seventeenth century; (4) evidence of household practices acquired through excavations of residential contexts; and (5) ceramics, material culture, and dietary remains recovered from midden deposits. These inquiries into the conditions of daily life in the indigenous community provide the empirical foundation for a rich historical reconstruction of cultural practices at Conchagua Vieja.

The convergence of data from topographic mapping, archaeological excavations, and unpublished archival documents from repositories in Guatemala provides a basis for evaluating the changing nature of human occupation in the Gulf region under Spanish colonization. Positioned among historical, environmental and cultural studies and at a powerful confluence of sub-disciplines within anthropology, the historical anthropology of the multi-ethnic Gulf of Fonseca region will stimulate further dialogue and intellectual exchange among anthropologists, historians, and other scholars working in El Salvador and Central America.

This dissertation describes the epistemic benefits of pursuing archaeological research in full partnership with Indigenous, descendant, and local communities, with particular attention to place-based knowledge and political context, drawing on my experience as a technical specialist and field worker on an archaeological project in the Chontales region of Central Nicaragua and as a co-principal investigator of an archaeological project in the Darién region of Eastern Panama. I begin by discussing examples of place-based knowledge shared with me by community partners and situate this concept within Native American and Indigenous Studies scholarship more broadly. I then describe how the political contexts of the communities with which I have worked have presented opportunities and challenges for ethically and epistemically effective collaborative research, including a consideration of trends in regional archaeological scholarship as they interact with these politics. A central feature of politics in Lower Central America, as in other settler-colonial contexts, is a lack of engagement with Indigenous Law on the part of settler political institutions. I explore this problem through the case of place-based internationalisms, which are structures, widespread across Indigenous legal systems, that employ place-based knowledge to coordinate international political relationships by tying diverse rights and responsibilities to particular places, thereby creating overlapping political landscapes that are often misunderstood or ignored by practitioners of settler-colonial law and archaeology alike. More generally, because of the importance of heritage in practices of nation-building, and because of explicitly and implicitly shared concepts in archaeology and settler-colonial law, archaeological research conducted without careful consideration of its political context can inadvertently promote nationalist agendas and undermine Indigenous sovereignty. In both Panama and Nicaragua, archaeological scholarship has been instrumental to nationalist projects, particularly by unwittingly sanctioning narratives of Indigenous disappearance. Beginning from the earliest phases of partnership initiation and project conception, and continuing throughout the research cycle, I dedicate the latter chapters of this dissertation to proposing alternative frameworks for collaborative archaeological practice in these places. I direct my focus primarily towards prospection—typically the first phase of archaeological investigation, with implications for all subsequent phases of research—and zooarchaeological laboratory analysis, which is often conducted without any involvement from community members, even in otherwise collaborative projects. I present results of both phases of investigation from Panama and Nicaragua respectively, detailing the ways that both place-based knowledge and political contextualization have been crucial for realizing in practice the potential epistemic goods that scholars of archaeology have long identified as a disciplinary benefit of collaborative research.

This dissertation research addresses the question of how basketry is a vital, living part of Karuk culture. Basketry is intertwined with nearly every aspect of everyday life, including Karuk onto-epistemology, traditional ecological knowledge, Karuk language, familial and community relationships, identity, and social memory. This research looks toward practices of weaving, allowing for understandings of baskets in broader social and historical contexts. Underscoring the vitality of basket weaving to everyday life, this research promotes the Karuk ontological view that baskets are living beings.

Tracing the history of the Karuk Tribe through multiple lenses, I investigate the ways in which Karuk peoples adapted to the devastating consequences of contact with non-Indians in 1850. This history highlights the genocide of the Karuk peoples and the laws set in place that were designed to eradicate Native peoples, who were considered to impede the development of the rich resources of the Klamath River region. Differences in worldviews underscored the battleground over natural resources. However, according to Karuk onto-epistemology, these natural resources, as well as objects such as basketry, are a part of a complex network of social beings, ikxaréeyavsa, who inhabited the world before humans. Evidenced in myths, stories, and the Karuk language, basketry is made for specific purposes and peoples, and are members—agents—of Karuk communities, who are born, participate in social life and mediate the moral relationships between people and objects.

A mere forty years after contact with non-Indian settlers, the national craze for handcrafted goods fueled a burgeoning tourist trade. Karuk women wove baskets by the thousands to satisfy the demands of collectors and connoisseurs, while at the same time anthropologists amassed well-worn examples of basketry to grow their museum research collections. Through sale, theft, coercion, and bartering, both new and old baskets left the Klamath River.

Many of the baskets sold during the height of the Arts and Crafts movement made their way into museum collections. The documentation of one such collection at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History provides a unique understanding of the everyday negotiations weavers took in order to provide for their families. In her discourse about this collection, Phoebe Maddux (Karuk) expressed evocative details about the baskets from her perspective, resisting a classificatory approach to understanding the meaning of these baskets. Instead, her notions reinforce Karuk ways of knowing about basketry.

After the amplification of basket weaving for the Arts and Crafts market, buyers, collectors and museums lost interest in collecting Native American works. For this reason and others, fewer and fewer Karuk peoples wove. The racism that had endured since the gold rush era made weavers conceal their weaving. The impact of boarding school inculcation meant that few girls picked up weaving when they returned to Karuk homelands. The impact of land restrictions and fire suppression meant that weavers had little access to weaving materials. Additionally, the impact of the sale, theft, gift, and barter of baskets meant that there were scarcer representations of basket designs and styles available to weavers from which they could garner inspiration. But despite these negative consequences on Karuk basket weaving, it did not become a “lost culture.” A small number of weavers nurtured basket weaving, sharing their knowledge with others and continuing to maintain the understanding that baskets are relations-alive.

By the 1960s, weavers who had cultivated Karuk basket weaving knowledge through creative undertakings simultaneously taught classes, opened stores to sell their work, participated in weaving demonstrations at different events, and developed relationships with the US Forest Service to bring back the practice of prescribed burning. In the 1980s, Northwestern California Indian weavers were interviewed by Coleen Kelley Marks, who asked them to reflect on different aspect of basket weaving, from teaching and selling baskets to gathering and weaving techniques. Focusing on teaching and gathering, weavers revealed their frustrations and concerns about their ability to weave and pass the knowledge to the next generation. Weavers who shared their knowledge of the weaving culture with students felt deeply the responsibility as Karuk peoples to pass basket weaving to the next generation, thereby perpetuating the practice.

Contemporary Karuk weavers, though few, are persisting despite the lack of social and economic support, as well as the limited natural resources available to them. Combined with interviews with weavers from the 1980s, I discuss how today’s weavers embolden their relations with the natural resources they rely on for weaving materials; with the ancestors to carry forward the tradition of weaving to the next generation; and with the world to assist with reaffirming their Karuk identity through the principles of pikyav (to-fix-it).