AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

AAA 2000 Meeting, Public Archaeology Session chaired by Carol McDavid

Public archaeology from a Latin American perspective

 

Pedro Paulo A. Funari[1]

 

                        What is the epistemological statute of public archaeology in general and in Latin America in particular? Perhaps the simplest answer is return to a classic cui bono question. Archaeology was traditionally a discipline unconcerned with mundane implications of its practice, as if the scientific endeavour could be disentangled from the interests of states, groups and individuals. This naive understanding has been challenged in the past decades from several quarters. From outside archaeology, post-modernism has been a potent tool for deconstructing supposedly neutral scientific discourses. Inside archaeology, a semantic turning point can be spotted in Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley’s re-interpretation of the word itself archaeology: “the study of power”, not an elusive and detached “study of the past” (Shanks and Tilley 1987). This was in 1987 and in these thirteen years or so, there has been a burgeoning corpus of literature devoted to ethnicity, nationalism, cultural identity and politics, with a clear impact in archaeology (Kohl and Fawcett 1995). Archaeology has been under fire, cui bono, who benefits with archaeology?

You can read the entire text in: Public Archaeology 1, 4, 2001, 239-243.

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