Sustaining place-based knowledge through collaborative archaeological research: Case studies from Darién, Panama and Chontales, Nicaragua

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.

Advisor: Joyce, Rosemary