An Archaeology of Milpa Cultures: Maize and Ecological Worldbuilding in Central Mexico

Native American and Indigenous Studies invites you to a lecture, “An Archaeology of Milpa Cultures: Maize and Ecological Worldbuilding in Central Mexico” by Dr. Keitlyn Alcantara.

Through a case study of the contemporary and Late Postclassic (1325-1519 CE) Milpa Culture of Tlaxcala, Mexico, An Archaeology of Milpa Cultures: Maize and Ecological Worldbuilding in Central Mexico challenges the idea that environmental crises are managed by human-driven solutions alone. Drawing from codices, oral histories, dietary isotopes and paleobotanical data co-interpreted with local farmers, this work reframes ecological care and crisis management as a multispecies endeavor. Pushing at the temporal boundedness of traditional archaeology, I explore the persistence of the milpa through moments of human cultural rupture (e.g. the expansion of the Aztec Empire, Spanish Colonialism, contemporary industrial expansion), to demonstrate how farmers draw inspiration from multispecies cooperation to resist settler colonial and industrial ecological frameworks.

Dr. Keitlyn Alcantara is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She began studying food and ecological systems through bioarchaeological paleodietary analysis at the Late Postclassic (1325-1519 CE) site of Tepeticpac, in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Using a community-engaged archaeological approach that relies on the co-interpretation of dietary isotope and paleobotanical data, her work has grown to emphasize the important links between the archaeological and the contemporary by tracing how settler colonial relationships to land become normalized and embodied, influencing narratives around environmental crises and how to respond to them. She sees archaeology as an important tool for supporting and highlighting the longstanding and persistent presence of communal and multispecies agricultural frameworks, and to learn from their resilient capacities.