Historical Archaeology Bottom-Up: Notes from Colombia

Abstract

In this chapter I gauge, bottom-up, 1 the basic issues historical archaeology has tra-ditionally addressed (modernity, capitalism, class), that is, I consider them from a situated position and from nonmodern considerations rather than from modern tenets enforced top-down. I would ask if the discussions that historical archaeology has positioned reproduce the cosmology of modernity, no matter that it strives to be a liberation force for the oppressed. Further, I inquire if there are other worldviews considered in such an endeavor. That is the purpose of the chapter: to answer those questions, discussing modern tenets bottom-up, especially (but not exclusively) as they translate into issues of temporality, territory, and ancestry. That these notes are written from Colombia is not unimportant. It is from the geopolitical south that I feel and write. My notes are thus intentioned and tinted, with the colors suppressed (but also imposed) by the colonial. Encapsulated Modernity The canonical account of modernity has that it originated in Europe and later spread worldwide, being differentially adopted in most countries. Such an adoption oc-curred as a replacement by which nonmodern conceptions of society, economy, pol-itics, subjectivity, gave way to truly modern ones through public policies geared to-wards modernization. This replacement model not only implied that modernity was self-contained (an export package) but also that coloniality was a residual undesired 1