Disaster, Resistance, Community

Our modern, globalized world shudders from political, social, pandemic, and ecological catastrophes. What lessons can we learn from Indigenous communities for whom the world has ended many times, in disasters both natural and colonial, only to flourish afterward?

Since 2018 the Proyecto Arqueológico Río Grande de Chone’s community-oriented archaeological survey, excavation, and educational outreach along Ecuador’s Río Grande de Chone and its tributaries has focused on the societies built and nurtured over 4,000 years in this hilly coastal area. Indigenous and Montubio communities have made these “marginal” volcanic landscapes—subject to drought, El Niño, and colonial “disasters of development”—productive and meaningful. This talk will explore these themes through the area’s material culture, especially ceramic artifacts, obsidian, and fossils. PARGC has shown that Río Grande de Chone is not a peripheral place, but crucial to the rich tapestry of South American worlds past, present, and future.

This event will include live, English captioning.

With Corey Herrmann
Ph.D. Candidate @Yale Department of Anthropology