Archaeologies of Intellectual Heritage?

Abstract

Focusing on the place known in the Palikur language as “Ivegepket” or “Lookout Point” in Amapa, Brazil, this paper considers the ethics of the choice not to excavate on a cosmologically significant sambaqui, during a public archaeology project in the Uaca Indigenous Area in 2000–2001. It argues that the ethical choice not to excavate at that time offered the opportunity to develop a different kind of archaeology: not the kind that maps objects in space and time, but one that engages the ways in which different intellectual heritages counter the ontological assumptions of modernity that the world can be known by mapping objects in space and time. The article traces the ways in which calling the shells waramwi-giyubi (the sacred anaconda’s garbage) or a sambaqui (shell mound), speak to different concerns, and different rationales for having knowledge of the world. The chapter proposes that the challenge is to move beyond matching perspectives, theirs to ours, in relation to the material record, and instead points to the value of the challenge to engage multiple ways of accounting for “the real”. Such a project involves not only an archaeology of nature (materials) nor of cultural anthropology as such (with its focus on the world of mythology and ideas), but an archaeology of the ecologies of knowledge and knowing; an archaeology of intellectual heritages, their interactions, and their value in grasping multiple ways of seeing and knowing the material record.