84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

April signals spring and the round of a new conference season. This year the Society for American Archaeology meetings were being held in Albuquerque New Mexico, and thence I went, hard on the heels of a personal trip to Southern India.

The purview of the project work now sets me firmly within the field of Heritage Studies, specifically indigenous cultural heritage. Project PI John Schofield and I had prepared a presentation on our paper recently submitted to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological institute, itself developed from the abstract I originally submitted for this year’s SAAs last autumn: “Runa. Indigenous Identity and Heritage in the 21st century." I presented the paper at the ‘Advances in Heritage Preservation’ session on 12th April, highlighting the emergent issues relating to indigenous heritage and discussing some of the findings of the survey of the three Andean communities carried out last year. There is little one can meaningfully say in the 15 minutes allotted to each presentation, but it is nevertheless important to raise the profile of these issues and the Society for American Archaeology annual meetings represent one of the foremost academic fora for dissemination of this nature.

Runa. Indigenous Identity and Heritage in the 21st Century.docx PDF file