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Coming of Age in Buenos Aires

The city, that world beyond the bounds of the family house, turns increasingly interesting as one abandons childhood. The mystery and variety appeal anxious explorer of the surrounding world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the world outside the house in suburban Buenos Aires was militarized, and the first steps by one own in the social forest of dangers and unknowns were also the first steps in a warlike landscape. I wonder if growing up at the hottest side of the cold war prepared myself in some way to the changes to overcome. As the public scars of 1970s’ guerilla’s action were progressively being effaced from the city streets and walls—and, as I would learn as part of the same process of growing up, were correspondingly concealed in clandestine jails of torture and death managed by the government—increasing voices of dissent managed to be heard here and there. “Open Theatre”, an un(anti)official cultural festival that started in 1981 and eventually had its theatre set on fire by repressive irregular forces, was one of the more visible signs that people would not remain in silence. Every Thursday afternoon the Madres de Plaza de Mayo continued, almost solitary, moving round, silently but visibly claiming for their missing daughters and sons, a walk that had the effect of a drop that manages to drill the stone. Finally, the labor syndicates, whose consequent members “supplied” thousands of victims of the clandestine jails, decided to organize their first public demonstration against the government.

In the early 1980s, as one began to be bored of repeating at school the goodness of Western Christian Civilization, and as the stupidity of official censorship became more and more obvious (Eric Clapton’s song Cocaine and Discépolo’s tango Cambalache red-listed among thousands of books, songs, and people), a general distrust on whatever discourse came from official means (the government, the school, TV, books) grew up as part of one self’s bodily composition.

Those were the early days of neo-liberalism. Reagan and Thatcher, but more decidedly Videla and Pinochet, prepared the scene for a new account on the roundness of the world. In Argentina, the 1978 Football World Cup-time fear for “the image of the nation in the world” was suddenly but consistently replaced by the fear for investment capital not coming to the country. “If capitals don’t come to Argentina”, it was once and again explained in the TV show interestingly called New Time (Tiempo Nuevo) “we won’t have possibilities of production, the economy would remain paralyzed, and we won’t have even the technology to produce insulin for diabetes treatment”. In those days there was not real chance to learn from an engaged discussion of these prophecies and, probably as an enduring consequence in political culture, the need of capital ended being assumed by the general public opinion for at least a couple of decades. Argentina was said to be neither a developed nor an underdeveloped country, but “developing”. Someway we were on the mood for change, and while we saw ourselves as becoming something else, at the same time we were defined as lacking something. While in the early 1970s the most popular political aims were liberation and socialism, in the early 1980s we needed capitals. In between, terror came from the state.

Thirty years later, the capitals have finally come in. We are, more than ever, on the way to development. Extraction of natural resources, depletion of fuel reserves, poisoning of water and land, dispossession of peasants, greater urban poverty and violence, commoditization of politics, collapse of public education, and reappearance of epidemics inexistent for a century time are several of the effects of foreign capital investment. At the same time that the blood of this country is still being sucked, I finally became an established archaeologist. Capital, blood, and archaeology seem to be completely unrelated things.

Capital, it is said, is about putting economy into movement; blood is about circulation of necessary elements for bodily well-being and life; archaeology is a science that studies the past through its material remains. This chapter is about the non-obvious relationships between capital, blood, and archaeology. It is about my live, my history, and my place. It is about the world I live in, and about my living in the world. Made through contexts of repression and resistance, to be an intellectual has to deal with the consequences of repression and resistance, that is, colonialism, coloniality, and decoloniality. As an archaeologist, this also means developing decolonial ways of understanding archaeology, the broader world, and myself.

Welcoming Capital: A Farewell to Land

As the Cold War was said to come to an end in 1989, the next decade would undergo major transformations. While a secular underdevelopment was the official diagnosis for third-world countries, their chance to become “emergent economies” came together with their extreme receptiveness of foreign capital investment. In practical terms, this meant opening up of financial barriers, reduction of royalties for non-renewable resource exploitation, greater flexibility of the labor relations, and disposition of juridical resources at the service of great capital. State investment in health, education, social infrastructure, and care diminished continuously, while different sorts of repression contained social unrest. The active role of multilateral finance organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in shaping these transformations along the decades of 1980 and 1990 was always justified by the assumed lack of financial capital. The cleansing terror of the military dictatorship was indeed coupled to a pedagogy terror: “we needed capital to develop ourselves, we needed development to survive”.

In 1989 I moved from Buenos Aires to Catamarca while a known wall was being smashed to portable tourist’s souvenirs in Berlin. Aside from implying a shift in personal lifestyle from a megalopolis to a provincial marginal town, that move made it possible for me to observe the face of the approaching edge of the reactivated colonial border. I also learned to see my own face reflected on the edge of that border. In those days the urban gaze saw the Catamarca valley lowlands as wild bush and unproductive land. I remember not knowing what to answer to the questions about what did people in Catamarca do. Those questions were marked by the expectation for a particular kind of answer: life is to be measured by its relative inclusion in the marketplace. What really matters when accounting for dwelling in one’s place is the market-oriented production, even better if the global market is targeted. In those days the desert-like bush interrupted by huge mountains where I moved in while the world was becoming a hamlet produced not too many things more than its very dwellers.

In 1990 I began an archaeological research project in the Coneta-Miraflores area immediately south of Catamarca city, starting with an intensive archaeological survey of the foothill and the alluvial plains, what gave me the opportunity to know local people. In El Bañado hamlet, a tiny place in the dry bushy plains, I looked in vain for different ways of engaging local people with the past I was bringing to light. Instead, I learned from local people’s stories. They told me how their production of charcoal from cut-wood which they sold on horse-driven carts in the city streets came to an end a decade before when a police checking point was set at the city entrance. Then they lived from the cattle they had in the bush and from several dispersed and small agricultural plots when they managed to withdraw water from the concrete-irrigation canals built in the 1950s for carrying water from a distant dam to the government-planned agricultural colonies immediately north and south of El Bañado. After a couple of years I left that research area. At the mid-1990s they began to be surrounded by fenced olive plantations, as the government promoted developmentally driven policies, including subsidies and tax deferral schemes. Land acquisition by olive entrepreneurs was never clear, neither clarified by the government. Most of the lowlands were remnants of communal lands of former indigenous nearby towns or disappeared haciendas, and consequently local people had no perfect titles but owned land customarily. Taking advantage of the land tenure legal status, real estate speculators intervened through mendacious actions obtaining and transferring titles to agri-business companies.

Twenty years later, the landscape of the valley lowlands has changed from wilderness to modernity. Olive plantations can be seen everywhere, while their water pumping from the always lowering subterranean streams remains unseen. Also the process of dispossession of local population remains invisible. Their lands were reduced so as to make cattle raising almost unviable, and many of the locals have migrated to the outskirt settlements around Catamarca city. As olive oil is produced for its exportation from Catamarca to overseas markets, the companies involved in the business multiply their incomes. At the end, capitals came in and the valley lowlands were developed. In the process local people were dispossessed of their land; as a result people grow more and more poor. As the local climatic conditions proved to be unsuitable for premium-olive oil production, capitals began to fly away to other valleys. Dried-out plantations where bushy woods used to grow, a couple of employees where rural communities used to make a living, dispossession and poverty, is the landscape left after the colonial boundary cycle passed.

My research project eventually came to an end just before the main changes happened to occur; I wrote three papers about settlement in the area some ten centuries before (Haber 1994, 1996; Haber et al. 1997), and one on the process of political organization and cultural mobilization of the local population that described local people as in the process of elaborating their identity as local villagers (Pizarro et al. 1995). I was unable to link social memory with land history, people’s voice with the matter of my research. My archaeological finds, as I saw them, were old and mute, and the words of people, as I listened to them, were about a shallow time. A conception of lineal time was implicit in my idea of history; my idea of archaeological remains was focused on materiality. I thought of myself as talking and writing separately about both local history and people’s telling of local history. I couldn’t see, though, up to which point I was intervening in (un)doing local people’s history. Now that time has gone and land has almost gone, history hurts.

Exactly what is hurtful for me as an archaeologist? Even feeling myself in solidarity with local people, the way that the archaeological discipline equipped me with the means to obtain knowledge placed me on the colonialist side of the border. I was looking for knowledge in the countryside. I was interested in long-term history, and I looked for archaeological finds in an extensive area of alluvial lowlands covered with xerophytic bush and open woods. I found several sherd-scatters, tested several of them, and finally excavated one that seemed to have a plastered house floor (Haber 1994). Local people were not so interested in my research as in my presence, but were reluctant to identify themselves with the indigenous people that I admitted were responsible for the remains (Pizarro 2006). They talked about their own history in the area, and they told stories about the “Indians”, but I wasn’t able to listen to those stories as history. My faith in my privileged capacity to access old history in some way pervaded myself of learning local memory as history in itself. It is not that I feel responsible for recent colonial expansion in the area; I know that it was (and still is) a process that has its own impulse. But I also acknowledge my personal contribution to epistemic and historic violence on local people. My archaeological data were themselves a predatory construction that mined local culture and history, both in material and epistemic terms. Materially, I took away things from the soil. Epistemically, I conducted myself as if the metaphysical conditions of my discipline were universal and natural, as if my conception of time, materiality, and knowledge were naturally correct. My own constitution as an expert in the locality was a direct function of my predation on the local constitution.

Epistemological predation is, in fact, a corollary of an epistemic predation (de Castro 2010) or, even better, an ontological predation incorporated through the formative years at university. Western episteme needs to feed itself from the destruction of others’ epistemes; the Western being lives through the transformation of its other. The West exists only in its border. And the border of the West is always warlike. In postcolonial times, archaeology turned to be one more of the weapons used in the battlefield. Once you are inside the battle with a weapon in your hand, you can be hurt if you don’t know which side you should point at. This chapter is about remaking decisions, considering the ways archaeology, history, and knowledge are already weapons in the “cool” war.

Living at the Colonial Border

One of the main features of the current renewed cycle of colonialism is the appearance of huge amounts of capital available for venture investments. Financial fluidity makes possible the collection of capital from diverse sources and its investment in equally diverse ventures. It also fosters the everywhere appearance of developers, a new kind of people specialized in the transformation of knowledge into commodities.

In the case of the Catamarca valley lowlands, for instance, a combination of different pieces of knowledge were transformed by developers: agronomical engineering of olive plantations, olive oil processing and commercialization, arid land irrigation techniques, legal situation of local land tenure, juridical particularities of land appropriation, and financial prospecting. A mix of agronomy, laws, and business made able the expansion of the colonial border. Knowledge was transformed into commodity. Why is capital so voracious in poor countries? Why seems post-capitalism to have renewed the pace of colonial borders around the darker side of the globe? Economic causes, such as the oversupply of capital, are part of the explanation. But the culture of colonialism is also a central part of the understanding of the current border reactivation. The reorientation to poor countries of industrial extractive activities, which are also energy demanding and/or polluting, has been called “environmental racism”, which has been seen intimately coupled to an “ecological imperialism” (Machado 2009). Those industries are technologically driven and huge in scale, and imply very high capital investments and global markets. For the sake of maintaining high their revenues, these postcolonial investments imply ecological liabilities. The management of these is much cheaper to deal with in poor countries than in countries where the capitals come from. Metropolitan countries also tend to benefit much more from the colonial products. For instance, olive oil, paper, soy for oil and bio-fuel, and metals are goods mostly consumed in the north but mostly (and increasingly) produced in the south. Together with such an imbalance in the terms of exchange, the depletion of freshwater resources even in already arid dry areas, the pollution of water reservoirs with cyanide and land with glyphosate and other dangerous chemicals, and the consumption of huge amounts of energy with further ecological consequences are the main effects that remain within the colonies. At the same time goods and revenues flow to northern metropolis.

The peoples from the global south have our land and water polluted and depleted, our mountains milled to powder-size particles, our natural reserves emptied, and our people poisoned and dispossessed. Southern people are worthless than others from the perspective of global capital. Colonialism is always about land, its resources, and people. And it is always basically racist. This is the way post-capitalism—globalization by other name—recapitulates colonialism. Even while both Western leaders and thinkers are very eloquent about their ideas against racism and Western intellectuals and scholars are often very much committed in the same direction, the Western episteme, with its set of ideas about development, history, and charity, cannot avoid being a continuation of colonialism and racism in all its forms.

The remaining question is how is that colonial expansion is possible with a minimum of social resistance in the Catamarca valley plains. This question is not related to the contents of the pieces of knowledge combined in the development process, but on the fact that those—and other—pieces of knowledge were enacted in situ as hegemonic knowledge. In other words, it is not the semantics of knowledge what explains development a.k.a. colonial expansion in the absence of physical violence, but the performativity of expertise. This epistemic violence does not make its appearance at the very moment of colonial expansion, but is already disseminated by disciplining institutions (school, law, science). Thus, colonialism has, also in postcolonial contexts, a double-edged contribution of academic knowledge. On the one hand, it provides the content that produces, appropriately combined, the convenient commodities that justify the revenue expectancies of capital investment. On the other hand, scientific and academic knowledge already exerted epistemic violence on local knowledge, increasing credibility of its effectiveness and superiority in accounting for the world. Colonial expansion acts on the basis of hegemonic relationships already contributed upon by science and academic disciplines.

The place as intellectual against colonialism is the same place where I live in. It is my land, my air, my water, my people, my children, myself as person and as collective and as the place I am writing from and for. This is my political determination; it implies that this writing may be relevant for ones and irrelevant for others. But the place as intellectual is double: I’m also, as disciplined intellectual and willingly or not, an agent of epistemic violence. The border is not a line to be seen out there, but a relational difference that constitutes us.

I’m not in this place because of an intellectual fashion; I have no choice but to be here. I inhabit this land and this land inhabits me. And this writing is from this land and towards this piece of land. This writing is not only about colonialism but it is also about archaeology. How is archaeology involved in colonialism? I’ve already said something in this short introduction. I’ll now be more systematic in the exposition. Archaeology is involved in colonialism in different layers. I’ll proceed with an excavation of those layers, from the topsoil to the deep bottom, that is, from active orientations to epistemic and metaphysical understandings.

Archaeology and Colonialism I: Archaeology as Developer

As an undergraduate student in the late dictatorship and early post-dictatorship years in Argentina (mid-1980s), a central discussion in university was about the role of anthropologists and archaeologists. This discussion was bounded in the “applied” vs. “academic” knowledge debate, or, in other words, helping vs. knowing others. In the early 1990s, once in Catamarca, I met several colleagues that argued for the transformation of archaeological knowledge into a commodity for the tourism market, and thus transforming academic research into a strategy for development. At that time every single research-funding agency began to include “development” within the factors for asserting relevance for research proposals. Archaeologists moved massively to the idea of tourism development, albeit the great majority of them as a formal justification for their proposals, and only few of them designing programs for presenting sites and/or artifacts as tourist attractions.

At least since mid-twentieth century tourist industry is largely based on archaeological attractions in some countries as México, Perú, and Egypt. There, state investment in archaeological research is probably more related to tourist development than in other countries. It was nevertheless not until the 1990s that tourism was transformed into a global industry. With the aid of UNESCO-designed devices such as the World Heritage list, archaeological sites (and a bit later also landscapes) gained the potential of being transformed into commodities to be sold to national and/or international tourists coming in to see, touch, picture, and buy. Tourists “make” these sites as much as they visit them. Archaeologists intervene in supplying the material remains and the basic narrative fabric into which the remains are inserted so as to build them as a tourist experience. Archaeological knowledge is directly transformed into commodity. Tourist narratives couple an exploitation of the exotic, the passage of time, and the irretrievable otherness of the ruins, together with an explanation of the basics of archaeological discipline, its aims, its subject matter, and its methods. The other is built at a distance from the tourist, and the archaeologist is himself/herself placed as the necessary intermediate between the tourist and the attraction, between the present and the past, but also between the urban and the rural, the West and the indigenous, the modern and the precolonial. Archaeology is present in the content of the narrative and in the content of the ruins, but it is also present as the way—the correct way—of transcending the distance.

Several consequences arise from tourist development in peasant/indigenous areas apart from market place expansion. Only some of them are relevant at this stage. The irruption of the capitalist market in previous peasant and/or indigenous areas has many disastrous consequences for local people. The development of a tourist resource implies many associated businesses. Tourists pay for transportation, accommodation, meals, information, handicrafts, and a whole of further services, each one of these providing an opportunity for capital investment from outside the locality. Because local peasant communities’ economies are often at least partially based on self-subsistence, it is usually the case that local people have less available capital than outsiders to compete in equal conditions with them. Given such imbalances local people usually end allocated in the lowest echelons of the tourist industry, as cheap handicraft manufacturers, or as low-paid employees of outsiders’ businesses.

An even more dramatic consequence of tourist development is related to the commoditization of land, a process triggered as soon as the tourist development proves to be a real opportunity for venture capital investment. Local people’s relationship to land is usually regulated by customary law, and is rarely recognized by state bureaucracies. The pressure of real estate speculation, even sometimes through not entirely legitimate procedures, often results in the dispossession of local people from their land. The case of Tilcara and other towns in the Quebrada de Humahuaca area (Jujuy, Argentina) is quite eloquent of this process. Tilcareño people has been virtually dispossessed from their urban and semi-urban plots as soon as the inclusion of the Quebrada in the UNESCO World Heritage list as a cultural landscape began to show its effect in tourist development. The inclusion of their area in an international showcase fostered tourism and had the immediate effect on land prizes. The irony is that local dwellers, that is, the very reason for the Quebrada de Humahuaca being included in the UNESCO list, are the first victims of that inclusion. Tourism pushes the colonial border, and as it does so, it spoils its former attractiveness. Simulacra of the other are always preferred at the end, because the other, already transformed in the victim of tourism, is no more attractive once it displays the scars of violence.

It is not that archaeologists need to be directly involved in dispossession to make archaeology responsible of colonial consequences as those commented above. Archaeologists involved in development-oriented research are usually highly committed to the welfare of local people. It is highly probable that the dispossession of local peoples’ lands was never in the mind of the archaeologists researching in the Quebrada de Humahuaca area, including those who reconstructed the Pucará de Tilcara archaeological site, and lived in the area as personnel of a locally based research institute and museum. Colonialism need not to exclude good intentions or good practice; on the contrary, it is more often than not that the colonial border is driven by good intentions of helping others.

Archaeology is only one piece of knowledge mobilized in tourist development, others being the juridical status of land, tourist business and marketing, and many others. It is rare that archaeologists market tourism themselves, but archaeologists do intervene in marketing their own discipline by coupling it to development aims, as tourism. Archaeological discipline already builds its knowledge as a matter of expertise, distancing archaeological narratives from local people’s ones. The expertise of archaeology disjoins the knowledge that it produces about the past from local knowledge. The intervention of archaeology usually implies the exclusion of local knowledge, making it easy for archaeology to intervene in tourist development projects as expert knowledge—that is, autonomous from the people who are subject to the consequences of that knowledge and projects. It is often the case that tourist developers use archaeological narratives to build tourist commodities by their own. In these cases, the intervention of archaeology is indirect: having produced public texts about certain peoples and places, archaeologists do not retain control on them, exposing in public information and narratives that are used by third parties with their own aims.

The tourism market, once arrived, imposes its own dynamic. Tourism, being one of the main areas of market global expansion during the last couple of decades, is always looking for new formerly unknown destinies, always more distant and exotic, in order to feed the need of Western public consumption of its otherness. Once tourism market enters local communities, it is almost impossible to contain, local people being the first victims. “Community,” “sustainable,” “indigenous,” and other so-called strands of soft-brand “ecological” tourism have been developed in order to manage sad consequences of tourist expansion. It is never easy enough to know whether these tourisms are local communities’ initiatives in conditions of secured relationship to land and resources and local management of tourist services, or if on the contrary these labels are marketing make-ups seeking for ecologically minded shares of the tourist market. And even if the socio-economic consequences of tourism are locally controlled and managed, it remains to be seen which the sociocultural consequences would be, and how would these impact in locally sustained relationships to land.

Being the more important and visible, tourism is not the only development orientation of archaeology. Reactivation of largely abandoned agricultural technologies using archaeological data is a conspicuous trend alongside the Andes. Archaeologists intervene in these projects unburying supposedly forgotten technologies and planning and executing its reconstruction and reactivation. In a recent field survey of the present situation of formerly published reactivations, Alex Herrera (2011) has shown the overall unsuccessfulness of that strategy after two decades, and the superficiality of the views of technologically driven developmental change that inspired many of those reactivation projects. In the majority of the cases major external disturbances have not been observed in local communities, but it should be reminded that these are generally unsuccessful projects.

After many decades of development-oriented policies, an evaluation of the appropriateness of development as an aim is needed. As Escobar (2005) aptly poses, it is more probable that development policies are responsible for the worsening of social and economic conditions of the targeted populations than having fulfilled its purported aims. Development itself has been so much criticized as a concept and as a policy that it remains to be a mystery why it is so much recapitulated by its qualification as local, ecological, appropriate, sustainable, etc. The mystery seems to be focused on the fact that development is something that ends being desired but never accomplished or, even worse, because it is never accomplished it continues to be an object of desire (Žižek 2003).

When development consolidates as an object of desire, it becomes empty of meaningful content. It is attractive as a sign, not as a meaning. Development works as an empty significant placed at the arrow of a vector line. This unaccomplished (always-not-yet-accomplished) desired place is in some way close to the place of utterance of the rhetoric of development. The underdeveloped/developing world is uttered as if oriented towards the vector’s end; the South is uttered as yet lacking development, as oriented to it. Blending Aristotelian metaphysics of substance together with Judeo-Christian metaphysics of messianic time, the very idea of unfolding transmitted by the word development, implies that something is folded in some way. Certain possibilities are within something in a folded, latent, way, and these possibilities can be unfolded, actualized. In some sense, development is the shadow of the West as projected on the other.

The Pristine Other and the Gone Past, which are so appealing for the tourism industry, are related to the wide popularization of the vectorial theory of time in the West. While the orientation towards development cannot be proved, and except for the capitals involved the state of plentitude is never achieved, the vectoriality of time can at least be supplied with a sense of materiality and truth when doing archaeological tourism. Both pastness and otherness are conjoined in the personal experience of tourism, an experience that relationally places the person of the tourist in a progressive point of the vectorial timeline. Tourism need not be a true experience, for it is already experienced as truth. Visiting a ruin beside a peasant indigenous village provides the means to transform the tourist in a direct witness of vectorline time.

Archaeology and Colonialism II: Archaeology Licensing Development

Archaeology is increasingly implied in licensing development projects rather than actively intervening as developer itself. CRM legislation is quite different alongside the world, going from mandatory high-coverage impact assessment for every kind of soil movement in any kind of land to virtually inexistent pertinent legislation. Even in these latter cases, archaeological impact assessment is done when development projects are financed by multilateral agencies or when certain kinds of industries are to be established. Roadway building (and other lineal layout projects for transport infrastructure) and large-scale mining are among the projects usually demanding assessments. In Argentina, for instance, the mining industry has a singular environmental law that includes archaeological assessment, while large-scale agro-business, usually implying the modification of extensive tracts of land, does not. Archaeology intervenes researching the potential effects on archaeological remains of the actions to be executed by the project. In contexts where state governments are interested in the projects themselves, or even when mining companies have such a gigantic financial power that they virtually decide the orientation of governmental decisions, state control for professional impact assessment is quite limited. But even if impact assessments were not a matter of venial practices, the structure of archaeological intervention is what deserves to be analyzed here.

When included in impact assessments, archaeology is included in an administrative procedure already conceptualized for the licensing of a previously targeted project. The aims and general actions of the investment projects are not in question when archaeology is called to intervene. Archaeological remains are already defined as a specific segment of the material landscape to be acted upon, and archaeology is already defined as the expert knowledge to deal with it. Local knowledge regarding the same matter that matters archaeology is unworthy for the administrative procedure. In turns to be the case that archaeology quantifies and qualifies the impacts on cultural heritage, and even tries to maintain the entirety of the historical and cultural heritage. While archaeology acts on behalf of a cultural heritage to be potentially impacted by a project, it is usually the case that the very same project seriously challenges the continuity of the lives and culture of the heirs to that same heritage. While the heritage is already disjoined from its heirs, archaeology comes to intermediate between both of them. CRM places archaeology within that disjuncture. But the intermediation of archaeology is not balanced; archaeology, seen as a discipline specialized in the archaeological record, faces the heritage while neglecting the heirs’ relationship (territorial inheritance) to it.

This is particularly the case with large-scale mining, often but not always of the open-pit kind, usually including chemical procedures for mineral processing. Large-scale mining projects, rapidly expanding all along South America and Africa as soon as metropolitan nations prefer to get rid of such polluting industries, consume and pollute gigantic amounts of freshwater (even in desert areas), destroy significant aspects of the landscape, pollute the air, the soil, and the subsoil, corrupt local state bureaucracies in order to make them defend their interests, and introduces deep social divisions within local communities (Svampa and Antonelli 2009). Archaeology intervenes assessing the impact of these investment projects on the archaeological record, quantifying the impacts so that they can be included within the costs of the project. The scale of investment of large-scale mining projects tends to be so big that archaeological impacts don’t amount to the regulation of the project. Impact assessment is one of the most clear post-disciplinary devices for capitalist expansion, replacing political regulation through public governmental decisions by technical modulation through expert knowledge intervention (Lazzarato 2006). Large-scale mining projects’ feasibility is usually not precluded because of archaeological impacts, but local dwellers’ feasibility usually is. Nevertheless, what is the sense of managing the impacts on cultural heritage if mining challenges the life of local heir populations? A heritage without heirs is difficult to conceive if not as a symbol of the disappearance of cultural inheritance. Archaeological impact assessment seems to imply the replacement of inhabited inheritance by archaeological identity.

Archaeology and Colonialism III: Coloniality of Time

Modernity is, basically, a theory of history. It says that tradition withholds the human potential for mastering the world; liberating itself from tradition the full human potential could be actualized. Disease, famine, ignorance, poverty, and other evils will be overcome through the modern intervention controlling nature and tradition. History, within modern theory, moves from evil past to good future. Rational planning and intervention fuel the movement of history. Modernity is a theory of power over primary nature, and a practice of power over a second nature, that is, society. Domination of nature is always the domination of someone’s lands, usually being peasants and non-Western peoples. Modernity was always the theory of power of ascent social classes, being low nobility, bourgeoisie, conquerors, adventurers, and every kind of speculator. In the present time modernity is the theory of developers.

Western theory of time has at least two main components. One of them is linearity. Time passes from past to present to future along a timeline; and the timeline is the easiest representation of historic time. Events happen, one after the other. But the line of time is not just a line; it is also a vector. A vector is particular kind of straight line, which has magnitude and direction. The magnitude of time is the distance to a departure point, and the direction is its orientation in space. As a vector, history has a point of origin and a direction. Within Western tradition, the point of origin is sometimes overtly metaphysical, as in the case of the biblical creation, or the arrival of the Son of God to the human world. Within the modern recapitulation of Western tradition, another origin point is set in the onset of history, the knowledge about history as a period in time—a period that starts when historical knowledge does.

Within the West, res gestae begin when historia rerum gestarum departs: the (relevant) history of humankind begins when the (Western) discipline of knowledge of that history is invented. History—the events—is understood as a magnitude of time, that is, a length of the line from the metaphysical departure to the present. History, as viewed from the Western theory of time, consists in the history of the West. The history that happened and matters (that is, history of the West and its expansion on the other) has its origins in the invention of the device for codifying Western knowledge as superior (history as what it is told about what has happened). The origin point in Western version of history is coupled, thus, to its self-understanding as a superior civilization and at the same time to the consideration of the superiority of its own means for considering itself superior. The metaphysics of (Western) history is objectified in the timeline (in objective history), producing the effect of a metaphysical point of origin, being at the same time a naturalized place of knowledge. Such a point of origin marks the origin of the self (the West as civilization as a project of knowledge and intervention). The birth of Jesus in Nazareth is the main origin point in the time line, and marks the origin of the Christian self. Jesus’ life (what has happened) is narrated in the gospels (the tale of what has happened), and the correct knowledge of the sacred history is obtained through the reading of the sacred texts that codify history. In European countries, history is usually considered as having its origin when the first written historical sources through which they can be known appeared, usually from Roman conquerors, on particular places where they expanded. The resistant and dominated peoples, as named by those sources, become the ancestors of the now national selves. Before those peoples there was not history but prehistory. In the Americas, the arrival of Columbus is a second point of origin, marking the transplantation of the self to the New World, and separating history (known) from prehistory (unknown). Archaeology is devoted primarily to obtaining knowledge of pre-historic times, expanding Western coding and rules for knowing history over the periods lacking written sources. It remains clear that the place from where history is classified as known (or knowable) and unknown (or unknowable) is the same place from where the conquest is practiced and theorized. History as the representation of the Western self embodies the West as a discourse of knowledge and a project of domination.

As every metaphysical origin point that marks the onset of a project (moralizing, civilizing, purifying), Western timeline is also projected towards the future. For the Iberian conquerors in the Americas during the first modernity, the future was thought as a greater proximity to Christ. For the European conquerors during the second modernity, and the European descendants in the politically independent countries, and evolutionary anthropology, the future was thought as civilization (understood as Western civilization). For present-day developers and Western common sense in general, the future consists of development. Western time is always a vector, with a magnitude and a direction. This fundamental spatial orientation of Western time, hard wired in its founding metaphysics, is the way both space and otherness are collapsed in time. Western time connotes time and denotes domination. The West is a theory of history where history consists in the direction towards increasing domination of man over nature, of modernity over tradition, of the West over the other.

The idea of development is based on the vector kind of time, as it is understood by Western metaphysically based theory. This is why development need not be demonstrated to be a powerful significant: it is deeply rooted in Western metaphysics.

Archaeology is not innocent regarding the strengthening of Western notions of time. It expands the Western tradition of history to times when, and places where, that tradition is not directly applicable. Being archaeology a project of knowledge codified in Western ideas on time and history, it expands on “prehistoric” times and “oral” peoples the means for objectifying Western metaphysics. Archaeology awards Western time to non-Western peoples by transporting to their worlds the metaphysical conditionings of Western historiography. In this way, it can be said that the West feeds itself on histories-other-than-itself. Archaeology has a central role in this particular predatory process.

The West needs its other for fulfilling its core project of expansion. But the other needed by the West should not manifest itself as other-in-itself, that is, cannot manifest in its own terms, for those terms are unbearable for the West. When faced to the other-self, the West suffers being confronted to its own predatory self. Thus the other is represented as excessive, animal-like, governed by emotions and needs, repulsive, in other words, non-representable. The other must be tamed, already apprehensible by Western discourse even as other (that is, other-than-West). The other in Western discourse is already the shadow of the West; it cannot speak by itself, as Spivak (1988) argues, because it is already a shadow, not a self. The history of the other written by archaeology is already a history in Western terms, in the sense that the West has already awarded to the other its own metaphysics (Western time in the first hand).

Development is based on Western metaphysics of time. It implies a straight line with magnitude and a direction. As every people can be placed in a point on the timeline, each one’s development has a magnitude. That magnitude admits the comparison between any two societies in terms of relative development. As the core assumption is not just lineal but vector-like, it is implied that there are certain societies more developed than others, and that those who are underdeveloped should move along the vector in the direction already represented by developed societies, thus collapsing space and otherness in the representation of time. Development is an appeal to move forward in the line, usually said backwards: “come to this direction”, “develop yourselves”, “let us help you”, “let us show you the way”, “move forward”. Because of the kind of cultural colonization exerted by the West that consists in considering Western knowledge a superior kind of knowledge, what has been called the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano 2000), it can also be a discourse of the (already tamed) Other: “let us develop ourselves”, “let us be as them”, “let them help us and show us the way”.

Archaeology provides the means to naturalize and objectify the linearity of time and its vector-like orientation towards the future. Archaeology places its subject matter on lineal time, aligns each fact along the line, one after the other. The technical manipulation of time through chronometry has been a central preoccupation of archaeology because chronology is the objectification of the Western cultural ideas on time. Also, the strong emphasis of archaeology on evolution and/or process provides directionality to the timeline. Because archaeology has become the means to bridge the unbridgeable relationship with the “gone time”, it is archaeology itself the field that embodies the conveyance of an objective reality of Western time. The stratification of layers in an archaeological excavation is the most potent image of linearity and directionality, moving Western metaphysics from objectification to naturalization. Symbols based on Western lineal and vector time are not really known, but “felt” as natural. Thinking of the past as being in front of us, or living today, sounds unnatural, and saying such things can imply be considered insane. The naturalness of development owes much to archaeology’s provision of a material nature for Western metaphysical time.

Archaeology and Colonialism IV: Archaeology as Epistemic Violence

The metaphysical hard wiring of Western history is built within its own foundations and definitions of object and method. Within its historiographical frameworks Western metaphysics couples both, history as facts happening along the line of time and historiography as a set of rules and codes for privileging sight and alphabetic writing over memory and other textual traditions. Other historiographical traditions, based on oral devices, textiles, ritual, and performance, are ruled out from the methods accepted as correct. At the same time history becomes the self-narration of the West as superior civilization. Western history as res gestae and Western history as historia rerum gestarum, that is, history as what has happened and history as what is told about what has happened become, thus, one and the same thing with the West. The West is at once the subject matter of history and the agent of historiography (Trouillot 1997).

In fact, the founding of Western historiography is related to a double operation of domination of the other being and exclusion of other knowledge. In the fifth century B.C. Herodotus, the so-called Father of (Western) History, established a classification of knowledge in order to write a narrative about what has happened in the war the Greeks fought against the Medes. On the one hand, Herodotus coined the word barbaroi to nominate the cultural other, in fact, the enemies or would-be enemies of the Greeks. The epithet, coming from the repetition of the particle bar which, meaning nothing but a vocal sound, gives the idea that the other, not speaking the writer’s language, lacks a proper one. At the same time history, that is, the tale about what has happened, was to be written based on a classification of sources of information, a gradation of knowledge, from falseness to truth. The superior sources of information are for Herodotus those given to him directly by eyewitnesses, while social memory and legend were considered as polluted by imagination and falseness. Thus, already in the founding moments of Western historiography there was a coupling of the subject matter of history (what has happened) and the basic method for writing confident tales about what has happened. Linguistic (and cultural) competence on the historian’s language and eye witnessing complement each other to bound the writing of history about the self-relationship with the others within a cultural intimacy (Abercrombie 1998).

The classical Greek historiographic footprint was inherited by future expansionist organizations, such as the Roman Empire and the Christian Church. Roman writers described European barbarians, that is, their actual or potential enemies, as the other. In Renaissance times and after, those texts were to be considered the demarcations of the local divides between history and prehistory. When Iberian colonial expansion unfolded over the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, writing of history became a central imperial strategy of justification of invasion. Native peoples of Tawantinsuyo, while having their own textual traditions, lacked alphabetic writing. As a result, the European divide between history and prehistory was transported to the Americas. What was to evolve as “archaeology” in Europe for knowing times before alphabetic-writing sources was to be applied in the Americas to the study of the Other. The closer relationship of archaeological discipline to History in Europe and to Anthropology in the Americas, says a lot more about the first person of archaeological discipline than about any other fact.

Archaeology differs from history in a number of basic features. It, nevertheless, shares history’s foundational coupling of the metaphysical divide in its object and method. In fact, archaeology is, much more that it is usually acknowledged, an extension over the other of Western metaphysics of history. Archaeology introduces the language with which other’s relationship with ancestors, things and gods is collapsed within a discipline of knowledge (Haber 2012). This discipline is framed in a singular metaphysics that is transported as if it were universal, not as a planned aim, but in its very frameworks and fundamental definitions.

Back to the example drawn from my own brief research in the Catamarca valley alluvial plains, the archaeological discipline equipped me with a particular set of ideas about time and history. These ideas were coined in the Western belief in a lineal, dimensional, measurable time, and that history consists on accounting for what happened along that time. Even if interested on local oral references to local history, occupation of the area, and cultural and political identities, I was unable to recognize the constitutive differential link between archaeological data and social memory. I was disciplined to count only material remains as data for archaeology, and implicitly to exclude what remains in its non-material character. Focused on material remains from what I understood as a distant past (pre-Columbian, at least), I was almost implicitly equipped with the means to ignore the remaining consequences of colonialism in the area, and present local cultural mobilization in their silenced struggle to remain themselves.

Because of the involvement of the archaeological team with local population, local people visited us a couple of kilometers from El Bañado village where I excavated an area of 25 m2. One-half meter below the surface I found a plastered house floor delimited by lines of postholes (Haber 1994). This was the first (and the only one as far as I know) archaeological find for built settlement in the alluvial plains area (while on the contrary in the surrounding piedmont and hills there is plenty of visible remains of occupation) (Haber 1996; Haber et al. 1997). I thought that this find could be interesting for local people’s claims regarding traditional relationship to land, but their disinterest on my account (as apparently my own disinterest on their’s) proved that things were being thought otherwise. A boy came almost every day from El Bañado with the group of students to the excavation spot. When invited to participate of the excavation, he politely refused. Instead, he dug his own excavation just by ours. Happy to provide him with tools and plastic bags at his demand, he handed me a bag full of sherds at the end of the day. As I understood things happening, he was trying to engage as subject of research while he refused (as generally the local community did) to engage with the subject matter of the research. What was my research about was probably uninteresting for El Bañado people; the importance of the research was focused on who was spelling history out. It is evident now that local processes demanded at that time something different from archaeological surveying and excavation. But what wasn’t in that time as clear as now is that the sole presence of a “qualified” utterance exerts epistemic violence over local vocality. While one feels oneself equipped with a powerful instrument of knowledge as archaeology, one ends being instrument of the discipline. Researching archaeology in that context was an intervention that diminished local vocality. A parallel excavation dug by a boy was one local resistance, but it could not be assembled within the disciplinary framework put to work by a research design. There is an unacknowledged differential relationship between archaeological objectification and local subjectification.

The sole idea of expertise regarding the other’s place, culture and history, is violent to the difficult intercultural workings of symbolic expression and the concomitant collective subjetivation. As a banner in an archaeological museum in Antofagasta de la Sierra village (Catamarca, Argentina), explaining the exhibition assembled by the archaeological team that researches in the area, ends:

We have traveled as briefly as a breeze through 10,000 years of history of the man of Puna region. Antofagasta de la Sierra and its people go on living every day that difficult romance between the man and the desert. Lonely and beautiful landscapes, proud camelids, powerful winds, freezing winters and the burning summer sun, are part of the quotidian experience of Puneño people, today as they were thousands of years ago. They, men and women, continue to be here, serene, humble and proud. Maybe they know that they are heirs to a lineage that knew how to conquer the mountain and approximate the sky. Many people of this nation ignore all about the Puna, its inhospitable and heady beauty, its people’s silent hospitality, its thousands of years of history. Antofagasta de la Sierra walks towards the future trying to climb to the benefits of new technology, but without discarding its millenarian traditions. In order to do that it tries to recognize itself in it’s past and offer it to its conationals. If archaeologists are retrievers of memory, the people are the owner and custodian of that retrieved memory.

The role of archaeology seems to be to intermediate between the subjects of memory and memory itself. Any challenge to that intermediate position is felt as a challenge to the discipline as a whole. I received closed resistance from my colleagues as I commented the El Bañado boy case at the university department, as is the case every time other’s vocalities are listened. Once listened, local vocalities say: “we can deal with our history too, we don’t need you”.

My research in the El Bañado area came to an end in a couple of years from its starting date. A great deal had to be done in order to dismount epistemic violence from archaeological discipline.

Capital, Blood, and Archaeology

This chapter introduces a cultural contextualization of archaeological discipline in post-colonial times. Firstly, it was shown here how is the culture and practice of capital expansion as it is seen, not from the metropolis, but from the colonial border. This has implied depicting the border, both as a place of cultural and ideological production and a place of colonial friction. It was shown here how the construction of cultural hegemony concerning capitalism is an ongoing process, and that this process is often linked to intense forms of political violence, including diverse forms of state-commanded pedagogy. At the same time, the ways in which capitalism culture is based on broader Western metaphysics, prominently within this a singular theory of history, were described. The aim of this discussion is to depict capitalism as, apart from an economic and social system, a culture. The consequence of this discussion is a move of the view of capitalism as a political option to a cultural bond. Epistemically speaking, the border is the counterpoint of globalization. But in economical terms they are no counterpoints but structurally linked: the border is reactivated under the conditions of globalization capitalism.

As seen from the other side of globalization, the colonial border of capitalist expansion is shown under the banner of blood. Here, blood is to be understood as the necessary constituent for life. In Eduardo Galeano’s famous book (1971) given as a Trojan gift to the US President Obama by the Venezuelan President Chávez, blood includes the lives of the people, its land and resources, and the violence exerted over local resistances. Galeano rewrote the postcolonial history of Latin America through the description to what he called “the open veins”, that is, the mechanisms and instruments for sucking the blood of Latin America all along its history. Blood is a strong image, and is purposely so. Blood means, thus, not just the object of colonial sacking, but the place where I’m related to history not just as researcher, but also as inhabitant. Blood means that history hurts me, and that I consciously place myself in that place for relating with history.

I’m archaeologist. Archaeology is what I do, and what I do for a living. This chapter showed how is that archaeology places me on the other side of the colonial border concerning capital and blood (the “other” side here means the opposite side from where I would prefer to be). So, this is my explanation of my discomfort with archaeology and my point of departure from archaeology as it is. To depart does not imply to abandon, to forget neither to neglect. I’m seriously committed to understanding the place of the discipline in our world. I don’t share the common understanding of archaeology (often self-understanding) as a secondary or unimportant endeavor. I think that, albeit often unrecognized, archaeology is entangled at the very focus of postcolonial world and that postcolonial contexts are usually implicated at the trowel’s edge (Shepherd 2002). This text is a contribution to the theory of those postcolonial contexts and the roles that archaeology plays in them. The ethical contexts for archaeological practice are at the same time the political contexts of social practice and the epistemic contexts of subjectivity. If one thinks of layers of complicity, it should be said that the ethical discussion of archaeological practice should be informed by the relationships among the different layers, even cultural constituencies and ontological taken-for-granted. Once the role as agents of coloniality is clearly seen, openness to subjective change in intercultural conversation can be a desired aim (Haber 2011). But such an issue falls beyond the end of this text.