Changing/Multiple Narratives
Antonio, an Emberá tribe member from the community of Mogué, showing me a tropical forest plant that is used in traditional medicine.
Vocabulary
Traditional Ecological Knowledge:
Evolving knowledge about the relationships between human, animal, and plant communities and other features of the environment, in a specific place, acquired by local communities and passed down over long timescales. It often includes information about how humans can sustainably manage landscapes.
Pre-Hispanic:
A term used to refer to Indigenous history in the Americas prior to the arrival of the Spanish.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge is very important for conservation work today, but it is also important for reconstructing what happened in the past. Until 2019, when I started Darién Profundo, there was no scientific archaeology that had ever been done in Darién Province. Therefore, I didn’t have any local archaeological information to start from – where should I look for sites? What research questions should I ask? I would have had to infer these things from my previous research and the research of other archaeologists in other parts of the world, which may not be very helpful for figuring out what happened in Darién, since every context is unique. The Indigenous communities that still live here, though, know a lot about these places – including the archaeological sites that they live with and are often still considered sacred sites – and they have questions that they want answered.
Community-based participatory research is a great way to do research because it incorporates expert voices who usually get excluded – in this case, the voices of contemporary Indigenous people, who are descended from the people who built the archaeological sites we research. While a lot has changed over the past several millennia, tribes have preserved a lot of their Traditional Ecological Knowledge about how the forests work and how people should sustainably manage them, along with other cultural practices.
Sometimes, communities can help resolve longstanding archaeological debates and then inspire questions that lead research in new directions. Often, this research is related to contemporary politics. For example, one of the biggest questions for archaeologists of Darién is: what is the relationship between the tribes who live in the Province today (the Guna, the Emberá, and the Wounaan), and Darién’s pre-Hispanic Indigenous inhabitants? Spanish conquistadors refer to the Indigenous people of Darién as “the Cueva” and recorded 23 words of the supposed Cueva language. However, recent scholarship has shown that this list includes words from the Guna and Wounaan languages, as well as some from Arawak (a language used in Indigenous South America) and others from around the Caribbean. This could be the result of linguistic exchange between the Guna, Wounaan, and other Indigenous peoples of Darién, and Indigenous communities from South America and the Caribbean – there is good archaeological evidence that such long distance travel by canoe was very common. However, it could also be the result of faulty record-keeping by Spanish chroniclers. At the very least, the Spaniards who recorded these words did not seem to understand that multiple tribes were living in Darién and had different, more fluid concepts about land boundaries than the Spanish. Many texts have also stated that “the Cueva” went “extinct” shortly after the Spanish arrival. While the Spanish conquistadors did undoubtedly murder and enslave many Indigenous people in their Darién colony, and many more died from disease, “extinction” has usually been used an excuse to take land away from contemporary Indigenous people. While there is a lot more research to be done on this topic, collaborative archaeology with Indigenous partners has been very enlightening so far, as you’ll learn in the next section.