SAS Webinar
“Glittering and Glassy: Understanding the Intersection Of Colonial Mineral Extractivism and The Production of Late Rio Grande Lead Glaze-Painted Pottery In Seventeenth-Century New Mexico”
by
Danielle Marie Huerta
Saturday, November 11, 2023
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM PT

What happens to Indigenous technologies when the dissemination of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is forced to occur within a historical context characterized by colonial regimes of labor exploitation and religious/ideological subjugation? Within anthropology and archaeology, researchers have sought to answer this question through problematic narratives and models of culture contact and technological change, such as that of “quick replacement”— or the immediate abandonment of indigenous tools and technology in favor of European ones after conquest. However, this model ignores the intellectual contributions of Indigenous people whose ways of knowing have historically gone unacknowledged. In order to understand how Colonialism affects the very systems of knowledge it appropriates, it is necessary to understand how that knowledge is situated within Indigenous ways of interacting with and viewing the world around them. Danielle Marie Huerta will be presenting initial results from her multi-sited and methodologically diverse dissertation project that aims to understand how Spanish colonial mining practices in New Mexico may have impacted the ability of Pueblo potters to create and maintain communities of practice, cultural perceptions of place, and the ability to pass down sociotechnical knowledge from one generation to the next, ultimately leading to the decision by said potters to stop producing glaze-painted pottery in the early eighteenth-century.

Danielle Marie Huerta is a PhD Candidate at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Texas A & M University, College Station in 2015 and M.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2017. She is currently a Graduate Student Researcher and Archaeological Technician at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she supports their Environmental Protection and Compliance group with managing cultural resources. She has served as an Archaeological Technician with the Cibola National Forest, SEARCH, Inc., Aspen CRM Solutions, and Bureau of Land Management – New Mexico State Office. She has participated in multiple survey and excavation projects in the state of New Mexico since her first field school in Abiquiu in 2014.

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