Figure 3 - uploaded by Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius
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Schematic chart showing the political structure of the Fontezuelas ejido. One member from each of the 141 ejido households may vote for individuals on the Security Council and Executive Branch.
Source publication
Approximately 90% of Mexican archaeological sites are on communal ejido lands and yet the Mexican Constitution stipulates that all cultural heritage is the property of the federal government. Considering this disconnect between federal and local practices, how can archaeologists work with ejido communities to help preserve cultural patrimony? This...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... original ejido household has 5 to 6 parcels that are passed down by generation, in addition to co-ownership rights to the communal ejido land, which is approximately 602 hectares. Three branches structure Fontezuelas' ejido political organization (Figure 3). The General Assembly includes all 141 ejido households with the right to vote on community decisions such as communal land use. ...
Citations
... The challenges and opportunities of conducting archaeological research in the collective landholdings known as ejidos (discussed below) have been an important topic (e.g. Ardren, 2002;Cohen and Solinis-Casparius, 2017;Litka, 2013). However, because "the success with which the 'doing' of property occurs is always and ever conditional and contingent" (Blomley, 2003: 135), historicizing tenure regimes is key to understanding how they relate to archaeology in specific times and places. ...
In this paper, I examine a case of dispossession that made land belonging to Indigenous Totonac residents of San Antonio Ojital part of the archaeological site of El Tajín. To do so, I examine the failure of a 2016 claim made to Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Rather than this being a case of purpose-driven dispossession or an unintended consequence of well-meaning policies, I trace the ultimate causes to multicultural recognition, 19th-century land reforms, and the expansion of archaeological research in El Tajín. Liberal land reforms brought a private property regime into being through enrollment and inscription, and Totonac landowners around El Tajín used the regime to their benefit. As El Tajín expanded though excavation, archaeologists and landowners used the private property regime’s conception of space to address conflicts in El Tajín. The resulting pragmatic accommodations would ultimately fail landowners when an archaeological megaproject came in. Ultimately, I argue for an historical and contextual understanding of archaeology and land tenure to understand the discipline’s diverse relationships with dispossession.
Airborne laser scanning or lidar has now been used by archaeologists for twenty years, with many of the first applications relying on data acquired by public agencies seeking to establish baseline elevation maps, mainly in Europe and North America. More recently, several wide-area acquisitions have been designed and commissioned by archaeologists, the most extensive of which cover tropical forest environments in the Americas and Southeast Asia. In these regions, the ability of lidar to map microtopographic relief and reveal anthropogenic traces on the Earth’s surface, even beneath dense vegetation, has been welcomed by many as a transformational breakthrough in our field of research. Nevertheless, applications of the method have attracted a measure of criticism and controversy, and the impact and significance of lidar are still debated. Now that wide-area, high-density laser scanning is becoming a standard part of many archaeologists’ toolkits, it is an opportune moment to reflect on its position in contemporary archaeological practice and to move towards a code of ethics that is vital for scientific research. The papers in this Special Collection draw on experiences with using lidar in archaeological research programs, not only to highlight the new insights that derive from it but also to cast a critical eye on past practices and to assess what challenges and opportunities remain for developing codes of ethics. Using examples from a range of countries and environments, contributions revolve around three key themes: data management and access; the role of stakeholders; and public education. We draw on our collective experiences to propose a range of improvements in how we collect, use, and share lidar data, and we argue that as lidar acquisitions mature we are well positioned to produce ethical, impactful, and reproducible research using the technique.
