This is the blog for the ongoing archaeological and ethnohistoric project at the Kaqchikel Maya site of San Pedro de Aguacatepeque in Alotenango, Guatemala. This project is focused on investigating changes and continuities in daily life at the community of Aguacatepeque over its long occupation between 900-1800 AD. We place particular emphasis on examining the changes and disruptions caused by Spanish colonization, and the processes and practices through which Aguacatepeque’s residents negotiated the violence and opportunities of the colonial world.
Blog posts by project personnel and guest posts by project collaborators will provide daily and weekly updates on in-progress research both in the field and in the lab, and a variety of other topics related to the research at Aguacatepeque, Maya archaeology, heritage and collaborative/public archaeology in Guatemala.
Project personnel:
Guido Pezzarossi (co-director): Guido is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology (Archaeology Track) at Stanford University and co-director of the Highland Maya Colonial Archaeology Project at San Pedro de Aguacatepeque (his dissertation project, that has been running since 2009). He is especially interested in multi-disciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to the archaeology of colonial encounters, and the entanglements between people, things and ideas that structured the tempo and outcomes of early modern colonial encounters and spurred the emergence of expansive global networks.
Luisa Escobar (co-director): Luisa is an archaeologist affiliated with la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. Luisa holds a Masters in Archaeology from the University of Miami, Florida, and a Diploma in Gender from the University of Chile. In addition, she has completed certification in paper conservation techniques from the Complutense University of Madrid.
Luisa has worked at various sites across Guatemala: on the South Coast at La Blanca and Tiquisate, in the Peten region at Tikal, San Bartolo and El Proyecto de Atlas Arqueologico. She has directed projects in the highlands, as well as numerous rescue projects in Guatemala City.
Currently, in addition to co-directing the project at San Pedro de Aguacatepeque, she directs el Proyecto de Conservacion y Gestion de Fondos del Archivo Juan Pedro Laporte in the Department of Archaeology at la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
In addition, the project is collaborating with faculty, research scientists and students from the Stanford Archaeology Center, the University of California, Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility, the UMass-Boston Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, and la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
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