Collaborative Archaeologies of Settler Colonialism in the Maya Lowlands

Latin American and Caribbean theorists of the 20th century have characterized the ongoing systems of social order and knowledge production engendered by European colonialism across the American hemisphere as coloniality. In this talk, Tiffany C. Fryer (Society of Fellows, Humanities Council and Anthropology) gives a talk on how brings this scholarship on coloniality into conversation with the analytic of settler colonialism which has more readily been applied to the colonial afterlives of Anglophone contexts. By presenting the findings of a community-centered archaeological research initiative from the Yucatan Peninsula, Fryer shows how we might also productively characterize the region as settler-colonial. She argues that by reorienting our characterization of Yucatan’s colonial condition as settler-colonial rather than post-colonial we can better understand the origins and afterlives of conflicts like the Caste War of Yucatan, which entirely reorganizes the social geographies of the peninsula from the mid-19th century onwards.

Registration required: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvdu2qpj0sHNYadLbnqjocPF67Cih9s