Reconfiguring the Archaeological Sensibility: Mediating Heritage at Teotihuacan, Mexico: Versions for "Notes"

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1. Yet what Yahoo! was not aware of was the current furor over international corporations stepping into the local Mexican valley and disrupting the economies and traditional lifeways of the five adjacent pueblos. Wal-Mart had just muscled economic leverage at the national level to open a store within the protected boundary of the site – just 2km from the Pyramid of the Sun (Figure 5.1). Protests, riots, hunger fasts and vandalism had upstaged the archaeological site and its pyramids for the entirety of the end of 2004. And INAH (and other government officials) had been branded by heritage-minded Mexicans as a traitor in selling itself out to the interests of transnational corporations (TeotihuaWalmart slideshow). Damage was in fact done to subsurface structures in the process of laying the foundation for the superstore. This time INAH had to stick to the letter of the law (DII-IA-I, sección 10 del SNTE 1983) and avoid local ire, particularly as these statutes are currently being rewritten to incorporate wider societal input (INAH 2005). While a brief montage of the web-like politics encapsulating archaeology at Teotihuacan, the short of it: politics of manifesting and managing the past go all the way to bedrock.

2. While augmenting individual's participation (through contribution to the content and form of the internet) Web 2.0 is still largely confined to a participatory interface of 2-dimensions. An internet user, positioned before the archetypal 'window' of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the computer monitor, may view 3-dimensional material imbedded in the window, but nonetheless remains outside of and at a distance from the media environment (a concrete example is the act of viewing the video below). Indeed, some have argued that in this respect, new media perpetuates the very old Renaissance perspectival ideal view-through-a-frame (Friedberg 2006). Immersive, Virtual Reality (VR) challenges this participation-as-a-viewer interface, but require (as of now) both prohibitively expensive technological apparatuses to accomplish the effect and immense bandwidth capacity for these environments to be transmitted to remote users. But developing out of military and gaming technologies, the online virtual world of SecondLife approaches the future of immersive participation through the internet. VRML, or such near-immersive, 3-dimensional internet mediums, is already provoking new media artists and archaeologists to experiment with on-line, 3-dimensional archives (video 3, L2 Project at Stanford). With rumors of Google purchasing SecondLife, the stage may be set for the development of a new, Web 3.0 where interface may be via our online avatars walking into virtual banks, perusing university library shelves, sitting in virtual cinemas, and even exploring archaeological sites.

3.I term the 'external mandate' to include both the mounting insistence by indigenous communities for more control over archaeological research with their defined material culture, as well as the growth of professional organization codes of ethics to accommodate these non-disciplinarian requests. The former, figuring prominently in the United States with the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, Public Law 101-601) of 1990, often carry legally binding prescriptions as well as punitive measures to ensure consultation. The latter, such as the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) principles of professional responsibility and code of ethics, the International Council of Monuments (ICOMOS) statement of ethics, the European Association of Archaeologists's (EAA) code of practice, the Institute of Field Archaeologists's (IFA) code, or the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists, Inc. (AACAI) ethics, encourage consultation and integration of indigenous and local stakeholder concerns in archaeological practice. Cumulatively, there has been a pronounced change over the past decade in how heritage management is conducted.

4. Indeed, a dystopic vision of Web 2.0 cautions the embrace of digital idealism. ‘Intellipedia’, or a wiki utilized by the various intelligence collecting agencies of the US government, has just gone into operation as the elusive solution to the current administrations efforts to accelerate information gathering and sharing under an integrated Homeland Security (San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2006). For a recent discussion specific to anthropological concerns, see Kelty and Marcus (2007).

5. A quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of wikis as collaborative tools in pedagogical settings and heritage management is currently underway through a joint study by archaeologists at Göteborg University, Sweden and Stanford University.

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