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Haunting Archaeology: Latin America’s Past and ‘the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’ A talk by O. Hugo Benavides, Ph.D., Fordham University

Almost a century ago William Faulkner stated: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” During this time archaeology has struggled with hailing itself the scientific arbiter of the past, while also being one more element of the historical equation. In his talk, Dr. Benavides focuses on this conundrum of the haunting of the past and archaeology’s own haunting as seen from the political landscape of Latin America: How is the past, and the Latin American past in particular, an emblem of today’s processes of globalization? How do failed productions of the past inform today’s Latin American political landscape? And ultimately, how does archaeology contribute to our understanding of “a (global) history of the vanishing present?”

This talk is sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Anthropology Department