Constructing From the South. A Post-Colonial Perspective on Scientific Cooperation in Archaeology in Uruguay

Abstract

For the last ten years, the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of the Republic in Uruguay (Universidad de la República, UdelaR) have had cooperation links. These began as research projects, but have now led to the establishment of a joint scientific research and work unit. The recent creation of the Landscape Archaeology and Heritage Laboratory (in Spanish, LAPPU), as a scientific unit of the UdelaR, is the final and most outstanding result of this international cooperation. The LAPPU mainly carries out activities in the field of the integrated management of cultural heritage. Its focus is on the consolidation of lines of action aimed at the integration of cultural heritage within public policies, institutional enforcement, knowledge transfer, local development and the socialization and participative construction of heritage through different projects and inter-institutional agreements.In this paper we will present the epistemological basis and the path towards the cooperation we have maintained, exemplified by one of our main projects: The Archaeological Landscape of Lowlands in Uruguay, which took place in the rural areas of Tacuarembó. This archaeological and anthropological project has its foundations in the research-project Situated in Place and in the dialogical interaction between local and global, rural and urban, and traditional and modern, as a way of generating practical knowledge and instruments for local community empowerment. The specific act of researching “other heritages” that represent groups of indigenous peoples and those of African origin who have been marginalized culturally and historically in the construction of the Uruguayan Nation -State has made it possible to create a platform for multi-vocal and postcolonial articulation on different levels (such as academics, politicians, urban public, rural communities and African descendants). But it has also led us to deal with new ways of approaching heritage (not only in academic practices but also in social processes) involving new actors and including inter-generational dialogues. As a result, participative methodologies emerged as something engaged in the very nature of heritage understood as a social resource. From these experiences, the challenge for the LAPPU will be to de-centralise and create more platforms for the articulation of these multi-vocal approaches to heritage.