 Hello, welcome to the Archaeological Research Facility. I'd like to begin with a land acknowledgement. The Archaeological Research Facility is located on Huchin, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chuchinya-speaking Aloni people, successor of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Aloni people and that the Archean inherits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Aloni ancestors and erased living Aloni people from the present and the future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archeological inheritance in support of Aloni sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. So with that, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Archaeological Research Facilities Ground Bag and I'd like to invite Professor Rosemary Joyce to introduce our speaker. Thank you very much. It gives me real pleasure to introduce Esteban Miron-Marvan. Esteban joined the Berkeley program in fall 2015 after completing his undergraduate training at Mexico's prestigious Escuela Nacional de Antropología y Historia. As an entering student, he was selected for the UC-Mexus Conaseat Graduate Fellowship funded by a consortium of the UC system and Conaseat, Mexico's equivalent of the NSF. This recognized his promise as an anthropological archeologist who already in his authoritative undergraduate thesis established himself as an expert on classic Maya ceramics of the Western Maya region where he had worked with his undergraduate sponsor Professor Rodrigo Leando of UNAM. I appreciated his interest in understanding ceramics, not merely as chronological markers, but as indices of practices and looked forward to developing his skills as a ceramic analyst. I think it's fair to say that neither his Mexican sponsors nor I could have predicted the way that he would respond to Berkeley, quickly forming a desire to go beyond conventional archeological work to explore community-engaged scholarship around the World Heritage Site of Palenque. As part of pursuing this goal, he took coursework with Professor William Hanks and independently pursued beginning instruction in the Maya language, Chol, spoken around Palenque. He embarked on a project pursuing ethnographic understanding of the ways Chol people understand history and what they see as the potential of archeology to contribute to their communities. He established networks with Chol people in communities in Northern Chiapas in Southern Tabasco as well as the Bay Area. He also worked with Chol poets in college faculty and traveled to the Zapatista-controlled territory in Chiapas to anticipate the ways the autonomous Maya of Chiapas might view his proposed research. Today, we'll hear from him about where this project undertaken largely during the COVID pandemic has taken him. While his original plans to live in a Chol community in Chiapas were deferred by this global crisis, Esteban took the initiative to find other ways to continue to pursue the goals of his project. These also hold promise for the post-pandemic future, including as part of the multi-year project, Rodrigo Leondo, Lisa Johnson and I have pending with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. What will be one of the first major Maya field projects to mindfully include community engagement from the beginning. I look forward to welcoming Dr. Maron Marvan to that post-doctoral project. Thank you very much, Rosemary, for the introduction. And hello, everyone. It is great to be back here, even if it's just virtually. I really missed attending the Brown bags at the ARV. And today, I'm going to talk to you about, oh, let me share my screen, sorry. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about the experiment on public Mayanist archeology that I have been trying during this pandemic. In the last months, with the support of a star grant given here at the ARV, there at the ARV because I am in Yucatan now. This is part of my dissertation research at Berkeley, as Rosemary said, which is an ethnographic project inquiring with Maya old people about their own conceptions of their past, their memory and history, including their views, sentiments and even complaints about archeology, archeological heritage, archeological tourism and the phenomena surrounding those. Mayanist archeology has extracted and exploited for more than a century the historical materiality of the Maya peoples. We are an extractive enterprise and we like to think that we are not. We like to pretend that we are only helping to know about the historical trajectories of human groups and the ancient history of the Maya peoples. And by doing that, we tend to ignore the economic and political impact that our work has on the present. The Maya cultures, their landscapes and the archeological heritage are now a product that local and global corporations profit from it. And also an imaginary construction that all the national states use to generate hegemonizing identities. From our discipline, along with the epigraphy, linguistics and sociocultural anthropology, the contemporary Maya peoples have been represented as part and continuity of cultural processes that are more than 3,000 years old. But the participation on archeological research processes and touristic, its processes and touristic development have been limited to work helping with the excavation tasks with the maintenance of sites and as a background giving authenticity to the touristic landscapes open to the market today. And well, I am putting a very diagnostic illustration here with John Lloyd Stephens being carried by the ancestor of some of my old friends around in their way from Tumbalatu Palenque. And right now they don't carry us in their shoulders but the hierarchical positions between the 1840s when this was drawn and today it's not that different than today actually. The laws that regulate archeology and its institutions in Mexico are really behind the international agreements on human rights and indigenous rights that my country has signed and ratified from almost 30 years ago. The discussions about science colonization have effectively changed the way of doing research with native communities on different parts of the continent and in the world. But at no point in the eight decades of existence of our INAA, our National Institute of Anthropology and History there has been any kind of interlocution between the scientific community and the Mayansi speaking indigenous peoples or any other indigenous peoples for that case whose stories we study. I firmly believe that we need to start thinking about the possibilities of sharing the custody, the decision making, the knowledge production and administration of archeological sites. Those places that are the ancestral testimonies of the peoples that have dwelt and continue living in what circumstantially is today the Mexican territory. The tendency is a complicated issue to claim that the pueblos originarios or the indigenous peoples in Mexico have all a traceable past on which you can assign archeologically who is ancestor of who is almost as hegemonic as to say that we are all Mexicans sharing the same history. These kinds of complexities have prevented Mexican archeology to seriously discuss and start the processes of its own decolonization. There is this old fallacy that has been going around since the times of Robert Redfield and the first ethnographies in the Maya region in the Yucatan Peninsula about the idea that it is us. And I am quoting the archeologist, not the Indian who sees the grandson living in the broken shell of his grandfather house. That was said by Robert Redfield. And the more I talk to child people, I realize that this is false. That although they don't narrate the ancient past in the same chronotopes as archeology or the national histories, many of the Choles do incorporate into their own interpretation the vast archeological materiality that surrounds them and have been incorporating it since millennia ago, at least 3,000 years. And parallel to the Choles who make a link connection with the ancient and classic Maya, many of the speakers of the Mayan languages in Mexico don't conceive a historical link with the ancient Maya or even consider the category Maya. This is an epitome that has been appropriated by some Mayan speakers in the last decades to use it politically and to revert the unequal conditions comparing them to the Kachlanes, the non-Indigenous as they call us. It has achieved momentum and it works very well as a political force. Although the category Maya does not have a lot of sense to many people locally, many Maya peoples locally. But even with this situation, I have recognized many individuals and some networks of Maya Chole people who want their stake in the Maya archeological heritage recognized and used in their benefit. Communities have adapted to historical contingencies, their processes and their geopolitical contexts with a long history of dispossession and territorial displacement, Indigenismo and its policies in Mexico has aimed to create an artificial, racial, cultural identity shared equally by all Mexicans since the 19th century, since late 19th century. Indigenismo ideology has conceived indigenousness as a problem to solve and solving it by diluting it, by appropriating and combining some of indigenous folklore that is palatable to Western consumption. That's very broadly what Indigenismo has been in the last one hundred and something years, in the last one hundred and something years. The fact that the link of Maya peoples with their ancient history is not generalized, does not exempt the Mexican state from the obligations established by international law, nor Mexican archeology from the scientific post-colonial developments of the world. We really need to radically change the way we appropriate our objective study. Anything short of starting the dialogues and processes towards a deep reform of the heritage legislation in Mexico, it would be just recolonizing the indigenous voice and their narratives to keep legitimating archeology as the only authentic custodian of the ancient history. I believe that we need to modify the whole scheme of authority and submit our research, not just to the approval by the federal government and the National Archeological Council, the Consejo de Arqueologie in Mexico, with their standards and conservation codes, but also to include the consent of indigenous representations erected and governed by themselves. After, of course, this has to be after a long process of dialogue, consultation and negotiation in which more problems are going to come out, but the fact that it is so complex, as I said, has prevented Mexican archeology to involve in these discussions. And I think that after all the long history of explicit dispossession and appropriation, oh, sorry, and appropriation, it is us archeologists that we need to make the first step towards those changes. Besides a few exceptions, archeology has not been a political tool to help claims of territory or autonomy in Mexico. And I think that we need to make it available as such. On my current PhD dissertation, I want to know what it would be required to facilitate the participation of modern Maya in Mayanist archeological research. What kind of forums are needed and who would be the interested parties in proposing alternatives to our loss? I want to know the ways Choles conceived and narrate their own history. And to achieve that, I started four years ago in ethnographical investigation with conversations with Choles men and women about these subjects. There are more than 250,000 people that speak Choles today as their native language. And they have a very complex history, full of dispossession and resistance to various conditions from the creation of the Choles towns of Tila, Tumala, and Palenque in the second half of the 16th century. Recently, the area that they occupied has expanded to the East due to many factors, population increase, land necessity, and all kinds of conflicts, even religious conflicts have pushed them to go to the Yucatan Peninsula, particularly to the Caribbean coast, and to Northern Petén near the border with Guatemala in southern Campeche, as well as the West coast of the U.S. There are now thousands of Choles living in the Bay Area, actually not as much as Yucatec Maya, but there are also thousands of Choles living there. Now, with all the tourist developments in the Caribbean coast of Mexico, they tend to migrate more towards that area instead of the United States, but there is still a big population there in the Bay Area. As they call their language, which means our language, is one of the Mayense languages with a closer relation with the one written on epigraphic texts and classic monuments, classic Maya as epigraphists call it. The Choles understand, obviously not all, but a good portion of the hieroglyphic transcriptions. After the last decades with the development in the deciphering of hieroglyphs, the truth is out there, as James Clifford said after visiting Palenque and write about it. The King Pacal spoke a language that is the predecessor of modern Maya Cholean languages. So from 2018 until March 2020, I was starting to explain my research and the reasons I am doing it to a couple of families in Palenque where I have worked for almost 20 years in Chiapas, families that I have known for the last 20 years, inviting some of its members to discuss their views on what we Cachlanes, non-indigenous as they call us, conceive as archeological data and heritage. At the same time, I was slowly getting acquainted with other Chole interlocutors from Northern Chiapas and beyond, including the Bay Area. I was starting to have the dialogues towards my dissertation questions and also, of course, learning about new ones. It was often that while explaining the reasons of my investigation, I had to describe the generalities of the archeological methods and what we broadly know about the classic Maya and the hieroglyphic inscriptions. And in order to attract as much interlocutors as I could, I organized public talks with the help of several people working for elementary and junior high schools, Casas de Cultura or cultural centers, Chiapas State Institutions and the Intercultural University of Tabasco. That helped me a lot to meet Choles that are interested in Mayanist archeology and epigraphy and want to talk and contest those ideas with the history as they conceive it. Among the archeologists working in Mexico, we generally lack commitment to disseminate the knowledge we produce with a broader public, even less so with the indigenous people that dwell and have dwelt for millennia in and around archeological sites we investigate today. The response to these public talks has been very positive, but nonetheless, I think that regarding my research objectives, it was a mistake to put myself as a lecturing figure instead of someone to go to contest and question other knowledges. But the damage is done and for the kind of bad ethnography that I have improving slowly over the last years, those public lectures turned out to be kind of a necessary setting to get involved with further conversations with interested individuals. So even though mistakes were made, I still think that one step towards getting rid of the colonial privileges that still benefit us is to strip away the solemnity and that archeology and epigraphy project to non-specialists to make our methods available to people whose language today is directly linked to the written epigraphic texts created more than 1500 years ago. And of course, as we all know in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived to Mexico and from then I have had to rely only on long distance communication through social networks. And I have to say that one of the best decisions I have done at the beginning of my research was to open a Facebook account and to discover the multiple forums and people talking about child culture, their language, their history and heritage. Of course, now with the pandemic, the social media interactions turn out to be essential with the stay-at-home directives. Kolejki Awajok, stay at your house, as it is said in show. And this is a protocol that I still have to adhere at here with my current IRB permissions. There is still a great device in the access to technology and telecommunications from the urban settings to rural indigenous towns. But in the last five or seven years, this divide has been getting shorter. Many small towns have carried internet signal from cities through long chains of microwave antennas crossing the mountains. And many people, mostly young, have acquired a smartphone. With COVID-19, the child social networks exploded with more activity, forums and much more members. So it's kind of a renaissance in the internet now and there's a lot of activity. And as part of the safe distance activities organized by the Chiapas state government and along with the director of the Casa de Cultura of the town of Tumbala, Chiapas, one of the main child towns, we planned one public talk, a streamed public talk about the ancient Maya and archeology to be streamed through one of the state Facebook pages. The event was widely successful for the internet, average internet, it was widely successful and the video quickly accumulated a couple of thousand views. And some viewers suggested the idea of creating more videos. This is the reason I decided to continue digitally with my dissemination campaign. So I created a YouTube channel called the archeology, which means archeology with my nickname. And I also opened a Facebook page named which means your ancestors. This name was suggested by a child speaker. On those platforms, I have published as for now, seven videos. So far, two of them with the support of the style brand that I am talking to you about now. And I am planning to publish between 10 and 13 more of them in the following six or seven months. With the content I create, with the help of the generous collaborations by Mayanist colleagues and child translators, I tried to disseminate through short videos what archeologists and epigraphists know about the ancient Maya, narrated by a child native speaker with Spanish subtitles. Most of the scripts have been the product of unpaid collaboration of Mayanist colleagues contributing with a short 500 to 600 word text explaining a subject of their specialization. Three of those subjects have been previously suggested by Chol audience members. On Facebook, the seven videos published so far have accumulated more than 10,000 views, which is incredible for me. And a lot of people have contacted me with questions and feedback, although mostly privately, almost never in the public forums, in the online platforms. So right now I am going to play to you one of those short videos. It is just five minutes and it's the only one so far that has English subtitles, thanks to Cuddle Rose Little, a linguist friend that works with the child language in Oklahoma University that made them. Saludos, Carla. And I want you to have an example of the content we create as well as giving you the opportunity to hear the language. Thank you. When there's what you hold, you put it in your quality here, it's easy to hatch, it's easy to develop, you have to be able to make sure that you can do it. I can do it, I like it, I want it because it's not easy, I want it because it's easy to make sure that you're able to make sure that you're able to make sure that you're able to make it. So I'm going to start the PowerPoint again. I'm sorry for the mistake. And here we go again. Well besides the first video that I talked to you and this one that you just saw there are as for now five more with three more coming in the following weeks and many more coming in the following months. The process of making these videos has become a very fertile setting to have an interest to have interesting dialogues, especially during the translation of the text by the different child paid collaborators. The discussions with them about how to express archaeological ideas have proven to be amazingly fruitful, providing insights insights for all the child views about the subjects that I am inquiring about. For example, how they translate the term Maya if they use the term at all or replace it with a more common lack which means our ancestors as they call it. I could not say our ancestors, but I say lack because they say our. Or other examples for how to express terms from epigraphy like underworld without sounding to Christian because there was no Christianity at those times. And it's a very personal setting to have many conversations about the past archeology and how it is viewed now, the translations. The feedback from the viewers that I have got so far has been also positive. As I have said, the responses from the public has been mostly individuals reaching privately. But it has been thanks to those some of those individuals that have that I have been introduced to several networks and forums and WhatsApp groups with lots of discussions about their heritage and history. I am learning about the temporalities that are that they are more interested in as well as the debates and opinions and points in common that they have about these subjects. And with this style grant, it will be possible to create content about more Mayanist archaeological topics. Several colleagues have manifested their generous interest to participate. And I will be able to make videos with subjects subjects as the history and mythology of Palenque through its epigraphy, the lives of ancient Maya women, funerary practices, ancient books or codices, the lithic tools and the life before chainsaws, axes and machetes, palebotany and the history of plants in the Chal region, historical archeology of northern Chiapas, archeological houses and the domestic life of the ancient Maya, ancient domestic religious practices, as well as other subjects that I hope audience members to keep suggesting in the following months. I hope that with these efforts to make available to a Chal audience archeological knowledge, I can help a little to provide tools for its appropriation and use to change institutional and legal terms of engagement between Mayan speaking communities, the academics and the industries. All the activities related to things such as salvage, archeology and research, material creation and exhibition, management of archeological sites, its economic impact, heritage phenomena and all the dialogues that are put together in a region and a place that includes such a melting pot of points of view as the World Heritage Site of Palenque. And I am going to, it's 10 to 1, I want to finish here and of course by thinking all the people at the archeological research facility and the anthropology department of Berkeley for all the support that it has been given to be during my graduate school from 2015, particularly to Rosemary Joyce, my professor of Rosemary Joyce, all my committee, dissertation committee members and all the professors at Berkeley. You guys have exposed me to ideas that have effectively changed me and I believe that you guys have already made me a better archaeologist and I thank you a lot for that. Now I would like to hear if there is any questions or to hear what do you think about this. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Esteban. We have the chat open in the YouTube channel. I don't see any questions right now. So unless I'm having difficulty with format. But if people want to post questions, meanwhile I'm going to take advantage of being the person moderating questions to ask you if you would talk a little bit more about how the dialogic process of translation actually takes place. What is your what is the process to tell us a little bit about that because you've pointed to that as an especially fruitful way to do this engaged scholarship. Well, yes, it changes from translator to translator. There are different circumstances on which it is translated because I work with I want to work with different translators to hear different chol variants in the videos. But generally it starts by me sending the 500 Spanish text and waiting a few days so they can have a draft. And once they have one we normally we meet together and discuss at length all the questions and all the possibilities of translation. And of course it is not always possible because of this technological divide. There is internet almost everywhere but it is not very good internet. So like Zoom meetings or live chats are not always very possible. But still even just with WhatsApp chats it develops into a very meaningful conversations about how to think about modern Kashlan western terms within the chol episteme. And it has been really great to hear. As I said, particularly when in almost all the videos has the word ancient Maya. And it varies widely from community to community to individual to individual how they think about that term. If they think about it, I think about it at all or not. So yeah, it's not just one meeting. It's always like a back and forth with several conversations about how to get a meaningful or narration that goes along with the lines of the western knowledge that is placed on the text. Wonderful. We have another question from Professor Kent Lightfoot who begins by saying excellent talk about your recent work. And his question is, what do you think the long term potential is of continuing this work and what are your possibilities for funding? Well, right now I am enjoying a star grant to fund from 10 to 13 videos, including the I am paying one person to edit those videos. So the one that you saw is kind of scrappy made by PowerPoint and not very professional. So I have now a much better editor. The potential on the long term, I really hope I can keep doing this. And even if I don't have any funding, it's not very expensive. It's just having the time to do it. And I don't know, I think it's besides that it's part of our obligation as scientists to disseminate and it's a good thing to do public science and public archaeology. I think I want to keep helping, providing the tools for the indigenous appropriation of archaeological data, as we see it, from the academic world and the heritage, as the world and states see it. How am I going to make it? I'm not sure how I'm going to fund or keep doing this, but I really hope I can. And I really hope I can meet a lot of people that I have been talking a lot virtually and have become good friends of some people. And I am dying to go there to go to Chiapas or the Mayan Riviera, which some of them live and have some in-person meetings and conversations. But for now, I still have to wait. Thank you. Thank you. I know that we've talked about the new grant program from the Venner-Gren Foundation. And I think that's the probably direction of some of those kinds of foundations would be funding. We have another question from Jerry Hamilton, who asks whether you have found much discrepancy between the description in glyphics, in the descriptions of day-to-day life compared to the archaeological record? Well, yes. Hieroglyphic inscriptions usually never talk about daily life. They are text historical or mythological text about very particular events or histories. The daily life, the vernacular daily life that everyone should have had, is generally omitted. Of course, there are categories like food categories or space categories that are mentioned and even time categories, chronotopes of those. Yeah, you can have a little glimpse of things about the daily life. Not narrations about it explicitly, but you can guess or second guess some of that. And yeah, the incredible thing is that in many of those words, particularly foodstuffs, it's very usual that it's a cognate, that they share the same word 1500 years ago and now in modern Chol now. So that's a point on which there's always a sparkle of interest. Like, oh, they have been eating pretty much the same for the people that don't know these facts. It's always a great thing to let people know about those things. Thank you. Thank you, Jerry. Saludos. I don't see any other questions in our Q&A. I just again would thank you very much for not only the presentation, but for the YouTube channel, which I hope everybody has an opportunity to access. And from my perspective as a myonist, I think what you've done in these YouTube videos, taking art and words that we primarily look at in terms of the lives of the kings and the rulers and giving them into this kind of dialogue really does provide that everyday life aspect that otherwise would be missing. So thank you for doing that. And I think we're very close to the end. If there's no other question, I will turn the floor over to Nico from the ARF for any last conversation. That's all. Thanks very much. Thanks to all of you. It was great to see you, Nico and everyone. And I hope to see you soon in May, one good day.