Introduction
Billboard on the side of the road in Darién, created by the Panamanian paramilitary border patrol group SENAFRONT, which reads, “Your decision, your future: narcotics trafficking has only two paths: jail or death. Don’t choose these paths and report illegal activities.”
Vocabulary
Darién:
The southeasternmost province of Panama, which borders Colombia.
Community-based participatory research:
A research framework that treats stakeholders as equal partners in designing research questions and methods, based on their interests and what actions they wish to take in their community.
Stakeholders:
People that have a vested interest in a particular archaeological site. Often, this refers to local or descendant communities, but it can also refer to museums, landowners, archaeologists, governments, etc.
Today, Darién is covered by dense tropical jungle and is known for being remote and difficult to access – so difficult that this area is still the only ‘gap’ in the Panamerican Highway that runs from Prudhoe, Alaska all the way to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. It is home to three Indigenous groups: the Emberá, the Wounaan, and the Guna. The Panamanian government has tried multiple times to complete the highway, and each time these groups have protested in order to protect the rainforest and their ways of life, so far with great success. Between the 1960s and 2016, few non-Darienistas (people from Darién) traveled to the Province because it was occupied by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a paramilitary group that engaged in kidnappings, illegal mining, extortion, and drug trafficking. Despite the peace deal signed by the FARC in 2016, the legacies of narcoterrorism and illegal exploitation of land continue to plague this area.
Darién is also currently in the news because just this past year, a record number of 42,000 migrants from as far away as Southeast Asia journeyed through the deep jungle of the Darién Gap trying to reach the United States and Canada.
Photo courtesy of CBS News
Now, why should we care about the contemporary politics of Darién? We’re studying archaeology, which looks at material from the past! First of all, my project uses a framework called community-based participatory research, which works with stakeholders who live in communities around the Province to identify research questions that are relevant to them today and then design research methods in partnership with them to answer those questions. This means we use some methods that are standard in archaeology, like archaeological survey (walking around looking for new archaeological sites) and excavation (digging!), but we also use methods that are a little more uncommon, like interviews, participatory mapping (helping community members map their towns and historical landmarks), and video production. It’s important to understand how people are living now in order to make sure that the research we do about the past is useful. Second, all archaeological projects create history, and as archaeologists we want to think carefully about the effects that history can have today. For example, archaeological evidence has both been used to help Indigenous groups protect their land and to take land away from them.