On October 8, Dr. Adriana Linares-Palma came to present her work on community-based archaeology in the Ixil region of Guatemala.
During visits to the area in the early 2010s, Dr. Linares-Palma was accompanied by local authorities and Professor Batz of UCSB to ancient sites. Becoming close with the locals and their spiritual representatives, Dr. Linares Palma eventually decided with the local and ancestral authorities to gain funding for archaeological work through her PHD process at UT Austin. Their eventual project, which consisted of non-destructive participatory mapping, was far from a normal excavation that would typically be sponsored by a university or the Guatemalan government.
Dr. Linares-Palma lived in Cotzal between 2018-2019 and was deeply involved with locals while engaging in this work. She describes a “constellation of memory” upheld through the community’s oral history: a body of knowledge and memory that connects ancestors and events to the present, ultimately contributing to archaeology by revealing the meaning(s) of found objects to local people. Sacred places are seen as intimately connected to ancestry; the Ixil word “totzotz k’uy kumam” describes a literal “house of the ancestors.”
Over the course of her research, Dr. Linares-Palma became aware of at least 2000 years of settlement in the region. Despite this long history, indigenous communities were not consulted during corporate archaeological digs in 2009 and 10, or the subsequent construction of a hydroelectric plant that desecrated the local landscape in all its spiritual significance.
Dr. Linares Palma is currently an independent archaeologist. She sees the field of archaeology as an inherently colonial practice, one that is supported by discriminatory legislation designed for profit. As the traditional practice in Guatemala involves corporate-led mega projects and no consultation to local communities, her community-based approach was unique and overdue. Decolonizing archaeology in her way allowed Ixil epistemology to sit front and center.