Historians and archaeologists of colonialism in the Americas have increasingly sought to interrupt conqueror:conquered and European:Indigenous binaries, yet to date we have learned little archaeologically of the Indigenous groups who enabled Tenochtitlan’s defeat. This talk presents findings for a household archaeology project in Tlaxcala, where residents successfully petitioned the Spanish king to recognize their military service and avoid the most excessive colonial exploitation. However, they soon suffered from the incursion of Spaniards and epidemic-induced population decline, and they were maligned as “traitors” by Mexican nation-building efforts. The archaeological record offers the potential for a restorative approach for the descendant community and the creation of more nuanced understandings of the everyday lives of their ancestors. This talk compares evidence for 16^th century household economic and ritual practices in Tlaxcala to that of more typical colonial subjects at Xaltocan, Mexico, to contemplate, “What, if anything, was different for Indigenous conqueror colonial subjects?”

Obsidian prismatic blades are routine ‘prehistoric period’ finds. While not prevalent, blade fragments and flakes nonetheless form part of the material memory of Amapa— a contemporary Oaxacan pueblo that was also, in another past present, a pueblo de cimarrones. Obsidian blades are only one object from Amapa’s patchy and brittle archaeological record that often consolidates time, fogging distinctions between material histories into forty-five centimeters of dirt. This paper considers Amapa’s archaeological present as a gateway where temporalities and histories meet—blurring before, during, and after. If ‘each epoch dreams the one that follows’ according to Michelet via Benjamin, what kind of (archaeological) future can we picture by dreaming with the objects that soil/archaeological strata variedly bring together— like Amapa’s plastic, unglazed ceramic sherds, and obsidian tools?

For scholars studying colonial Latin America the hacienda institution has become an index for certain sets of land and labor relations. This indexing enables scholars to make broad statements about processes such as indigenous dispossession and commercialization even though estates historically categorized as haciendas are incredibly inconsistent. In the Yucatan Peninsula, hacienda studies largely focus on the growth of industrial, market-oriented sugar and henequen plantations during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. While these studies provide important insights into regional political economy and the lived experiences of indebted laborers, by emphasizing these large, market-oriented plantation estates scholars obscure the variable role of this institution in the Yucatan Peninsula. Using haciendas constructed between the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries around the colonial frontier outpost of Tihosuco, we consider the ways Maya people in the peninsula’s hinterlands have engaged with these land-based institutions from the 1700s to the present.

The history of archaeological practice in Mexico and Central America reveals strong imperial desires to claim artifacts, monuments, and heritage for foreign powers. As a still emerging area of study, regional historical archaeology has the potential to help forge a different path for archaeological inquiry. This paper outlines two ways forward. One involves connecting communities with historical and contemporary connections to Yucatán, Mexico, (e.g., descendant communities) to build a diverse network of people who can speak to, against, and alongside archaeologists working in the region. The second entails providing archaeological data to local practitioners (e.g., farmers) who can help to interpret the results and mobilize them in considering their own futures. Specifically, information about previous regional responses to climate change and colonialism can directly contribute to discussion of today’s adaptation pathways. Combined, these approaches can strengthen an archaeological practice that works against, rather than furthering, regional land and heritage dispossession.

As noted the uncertain position of historical archaeology in Mesoamerica, particularly in Guatemala, has reified the divide between prehispanic and later colonial native histories in the region. At the same time, the archaeology of the recent/contemporary is especially neglected, obfuscating how colonialism continues to structure native experiences. This paper draws together Latin American subaltern and decolonial approaches with new materialism theories to explore the potential of historical and contemporary archaeology as a mode of “border thinking” that relies on the materialites of native presence and survivance to challenge these ruptured histories, and track new ways of writing against dominant narratives of colonialism, and modernity as a means of disrupting them. The goal is to emphasize the persistence between ancestral and modern native communities, as well as bridging the violence of colonization and the coloniality of the present and recent past in the production of more equitable futures in Guatemala.

Drawing on field excavations conducted in 2008 and 2009, and extensive research in documentary archives, we present an overview of the lives of people who were residents of the Spanish colonial town of Omoa, which developed adjacent to the Fortaleza de Omoa in the last half of the eighteenth century. Omoa was a majority African descendant community. Thus, we begin with the understanding that the majority of the excavated evidence most probably relates to free persons of partial African descent, first referred to in census documents as pardos and later as mulattos, or to the lives of formerly enslaved people who gained freedom at Omoa and are counted in the census documents as "Free Blacks". We examine the evidence that shows some residents were relatively wealthy, had cosmopolitan social connections, and used the opportunity of the development of this unique town to craft lives outside of normative Spanish colonial restrictions.

No settlement is an island. This paper presents results from ongoing research on the historical archaeology of Central America, showing how understanding one site on Honduras's Caribbean coast, the fortress and town of Omoa, requires investigation of settlements in other areas. Our excavations of the fortress and town of Omoa in 2008 and 2009 documented late 18th century residences. My research demonstrates that we cannot write the history of this 18th century Spanish fort without taking into account the history of the British Black River colony in eastern Honduras, and their connections with British settlements in what today is Belize. To understand Omoa, and particularly the histories of its African Diaspora populations, we need to take a regional scale approach that crosses the boundaries between territories controlled by different colonial powers, and the territory controlled by the independent indigenous Miskito nation.