ABSTRACT
Colonialist archaeological discourse about native histories imposed the idea that indigenous peoples and cultures were part of the past. The basis of this discourse, upon which the exclusion and subordination of ethnic alterity was largely predicated, was the idea that the subject matter of history is the past, not the present and the future. Native resistance to this discourse confronted a meaning-producing regime, that of national history, with local histories largely mobilized in the framework of ethnic struggle. The establishment of temporal continuity using material (archaeological) referents and the revitalization of social memories long silenced now become central elements of new social projects.
