South America Geography and Chronology

SCHEINSOHN, V.

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Springer Cham

Año: 2018; p. 1 - 17

In the international archaeological literature, SouthAmerican archaeology has been mainly interpretedby imposing Northern Hemisphere concepts andlabels. Some years ago (Scheinsohn 2003), I haveargued in favor of considering South Americandiversity and its particularities which runs counterto the application of concepts elaborated elsewhere.While decolonizing literature expands inEnglish-speaking countries, most known Englishbooks on South America archaeology are still written(e.g., Moore 2014) or edited by non-SouthAmerican archaeologists (e.g., Peregrine andEmber 2001). Even when different contributorsare included, those from South American countriesare in frank minority (e.g., Peregrine and Ember2001, only 2 out of 19 contributors are SouthAmerican). Thus, South American archaeology inEnglish language publications is still portrayed interms of extra-American archaeology without consideringvast quantities of literature written inSpanish. The reasons are multiple: the overallNorthern Hemisphere dominance in science (andhence in archaeology), the preference for an authorthat speaks from a known point of view, theunderplaying of South American archaeologists,etc. This last reason is quite problematic given theearly archaeological developments in differentSouth American countries (i.e., Tello and his disciplinesin the first half of the 1900s in PeruAmeghino and Moreno and their disciples at theend of nineteenth century in Argentina, etc.) and itsstrong research traditions.