ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on questioning the approaches to the most frequent documentary sources and their use in the interpretations of archaeological evidence. After a brief review of the main Latin American historiographic perspectives on colonial interactions, based on archival documents, conceptual and methodological alternatives are proposed to decolonize the meta-narratives that have become widespread in the identification and use of written sources and in archaeological interpretations. The proposal begins with a discussion of the social categories that predominate in the written colonial sources. Through the implementation of the principles and procedures of grounded theory on an extensive corpus of documents and the concept of intercultural communication, the chapter shows how more complex social fabrics result from the intercultural interactions. In turn, through the concept of contact spaces, it is possible to link this methodological critique with the places and scapes from which archaeological evidence emanates, making it possible to correlate the latter with documentary sources and expand the interpretation frameworks for interactions. Based on this methodological approach, archaeologists are challenged to deconstruct methods and techniques construed under colonialist frameworks.
