ABSTRACT
Colonial legacies world over have been investigated by archaeology since the second half of the twentieth century, when the recent past began to be a central disciplinary preoccupation. Although some trends of that research, such as that of Marxist public archaeology, have highlighted the coloniality of colonial legacies (not a redundancy, however), most have merely unfolded the tenets of modern archaeology, themselves also colonial, over the evidence of those legacies. This operates a curious, although predictable, double coloniality that does not seem to trouble archaeologists, yet it is a sign that the discipline fully participates in the construction of the modern-colonial order. We will explore these issues by describing a specific archaeological practice in South America (as well as the heritage interventions linked to it), that of the Jesuit-Guaraní missions. Our aim is to show how such research reinforces and reproduces the coloniality of the mission experience by deploying strategies of objectification, distance, and otherness and by celebrating such an experience from the viewpoint of the legitimacy of the colonial logic.
