Producing Pyramids: The Political Economy of Archaeology and Indigenous Labor in El Tajín, Mexico, 1936-1974

• In Event: Latin American Entanglements of Gender, Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, Coloniality - II

Abstract

As STS studies of laboratory research have demonstrated, the production of scientific knowledge often depends on the unrecognized labor of technicians and laborers. At the same time, in archaeological sites across Mexico, indigenous laborers are employed in the excavation and processing of pre-Hispanic material culture. While archaeologists have criticized the economic uses of the past as a devaluation of archaeological heritage, workers themselves emphasize the importance of archaeology in maintaining local livelihoods. Only recently have scholars begun to draw on STS to mediate between these perspectives as a means of understanding the relational constitution of scientific practice. In this paper, I use rarely-consulted administrative archives dealing with the archaeological site of El Tajín, Mexico, to explore the connections between scientific practice, indigenous labor, and local economies. Drawing on 24 years of seasonal payroll documents dating from between 1936 and 1974, I explore how archaeologists materially depended on indigenous labor in El Tajín, and the extent to which the communities of the region depended on archaeology as a source of wage labor. Based on the Tajín case, I argue that Mexican archaeology’s particular methodological emphasis on monumental reconstruction necessitated the creation of sizeable labor forces, and contributed to local socioeconomic inequality through selective hiring practices whose effects accumulated over time. In so doing, I put recent research on the political economy of archaeology and indigenous perspectives on the discipline into dialogue with an STS emphasis on the relational constitution of scientific practice.

Author

• Sam Holley-Kline, Stanford University