The SAA Archaeological Record - Society for American Archaeology

ARTICLE
DEVELOPMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND
LONG-TERM PARTNERSHIPS WITH
THE CHILEAN MAPUCHE
Tom D. Dillehay and Jose Saavedra
Tom D. Dillehay is Professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and José Saavedra is Professor at the Universidad ARCIS-Chile, Santiago, Chile.
In recent years, archaeologists have engaged in much discussion
and debate concerning the role that local community
awareness and participation should have in archaeological
research, particularly in remote indigenous areas where people
do not always understand the objectives and activities of archaeology.
Partnerships with these communities
can promote archaeology and make
people aware of the potential benefits of
archaeological research. For the purpose
of bringing more attention to this topic,
we report here on more than three
decades of archaeological and anthropological
research that the first author and
his colleagues have conducted with
Mapuche communities in south-central
Chile. This research has led to a productive
working partnership, mutual respect
and understanding, and the employment
of archaeological research to foster community-level
developmental projects.
The Mapuche are the most numerous of
the indigenous peoples living in Chile at
the present time. Numbering nearly
700,000 persons, they represent almost
three percent of the total population of the
country. In the Araucania region of southcentral
Chile, they constitute roughly 40
percent of the total rural population. A
much smaller number live in Argentina
near the Andean border with Chile. Until
the late 1800s, the Mapuche were independent
people. For centuries, they had
halted the Spanish conquest and kept
their frontier secure along the Bío Bío River. In the 1700s and
1900s, they expanded their culture into the Pampa and Patagonia
areas of Argentina and were second only to the Inca Empire in
terms of territorial control (Figure 1). Periods of both war and
peace, and especially a long frontier existence from the middle
Figure 1. Maximum cultural and demographic
expansion of the Mapuche people in the southern cone
(dark gray) of South America in the 1800s. Today
they are confined to south-central Chile and centralwestern
Argentina near the Chilean border.
1500s to the late 1800s, allowed the Mapuche to appropriate cultural
elements (e.g., horse) from the “huinka” (non-Mapuche) and
integrate them into their culture.
Despite the fact that the Chilean state aimed to assimilate the
Mapuche quickly, their geographic and
social isolation on indigenous lands
(reducciones) has allowed them to survive
and generally to reproduce their cultural
uniqueness even after military defeat and
partial assimilation into Chilean society
(UNPO 2012). While certain aspects of the
culture have changed over the past few
centuries as a result of contact with Europeans,
especially since the early twentieth
century, many of the religious practices
and beliefs generally have persisted. As
noted by several ethnographers (e.g., Bacigalupo
1998; Carruthers and Rodriguez
2009; Faron 1964; Ortiz 2009), religion
and ideology have helped the Mapuche to
survive culturally and ethnically. Today,
religious experiences, beliefs, and practices
still play a major role in shaping
other aspects of their lives (Figure 2), as
well as their politics.
The first author has been fortunate
enough to teach, conduct research, and
live intermittently in Chile since 1975,
focusing on academic program-building,
archaeology, and ethnoarchaeology (Dillehay
1989, 2007). Many of the challenges
of living and working there during the
mid-1970s to late 1980s were reminiscent of other countries in
the process of rebuilding their social science programs after
traumatic military coups. Field research in parts of Chile all but
ceased during the early years of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship;
however, since the early 1990s, the amount and scale of
4 The SAA Archaeological Record • May 2013