Doing the Groundwork: Braiding Knowledges at Piedras Negras Guatemala (1930–1939)

From 1930 to 1939 the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology sponsored archaeological work at the ancient Maya site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. American archaeologists contracted Indigenous workers with previous experience working in the chicle and mahogany industries. These workers provide an avenue for ‘epistemic disobedience’¹ or privileging the experience of colonized peoples to see how they, as Indigenous archaeological workers, were uniting technologies, techniques, knowledge, and industries in ways that influenced the practice of archaeology. Viewing the site as a community of practice² in which its products are extracted and interpreted through ‘braided knowledges’³ this paper explores Piedras Negras as a node of intellectual and industrial syncretism.

We challenge extant scholarship about Piedras Negras that presents the research as the result of Western knowledge production, contending that site boundaries are fictive, and the epistemes of archaeological knowledge limited. Beyond them lies a thus far overlooked and more complete narrative about how archaeological knowledge is produced — and who produces it. Through archive research we argue that reading not just the results, but also how results were created, constructed, and braided with industries, machineries, and local knowledge offers windows into the intellectual groundwork of the project and re-writes the protagonists of data construction.