Teaching and Learning Anthropology

Conceptual artist Rafa Esparza argues that adobe bricks are loaded with meaning and represent ethnic Mexican heritage and communion with land through Chicanx ritual labor. Our ethnographic experiences in northern New Mexico and our pedagogical and research work in experimental archaeology in California confirm Esparza’s assertion. Among traditional Chicanx villages in New Mexico, adobe construction serves to reinforce community relations. Among Chicanx college students, constructing experimental earthen ovens in the California laboratory creates new student communities and validates familial and social memories of adobe making in ancestral homelands. Bringing together initially separate research threads, we consider adobe’s culturally sustaining capacity and its potential in scientific archaeological research as inextricable facets of the same research-teaching system we now call ChicanXperimental archaeology. This article plants three interrelated seeds in that vein, offering starting points for: (1) a culturally sustaining college teaching model centered on adobe making; (2) a replicable experimental adobe oven construction and testing model with field-applicable results; and (3) project expansion to California elementary school classrooms with the same pedagogical and scientific goals in mind. We invite our readers, especially archaeologists and K-12 teachers, to explore and experiment alongside us, providing an experimental oven blueprint and suggestions as to prospects and best practices for both sides of this project.