Professor Katie Sampeck

Background

I investigate pre-Columbian practices and material worlds, how they both shaped and were transformed by colonial dynamics, and their lasting legacies for contemporary social, political, and economic struggles. I approach these topics through the study of material culture, food production and cuisine, and spatial organization and practices. I have developed diverse but interrelated lines of inquiry into Afro-Latin America, culinary and commodity chain studies (especially chocolate), and community-based Native American archaeology. 
My primary research locations are the Rio Ceniza Valley of what is today western El Salvador and the homeland of Cherokees in the Trans-Appalachian region of the U.S. Southeast, both areas that have seen relatively limited scholarly attention. The Izalcos region in the Rio Ceniza Valley was the site of some of the worst abuses in sixteenth-century Spanish America, legacies of violence and extraction that have had enduring repercussions. My work exposes those historical foundations, revealing their connections to the present, and highlighting the resilience and creativity of Afro-Salvadoran and Indigenous Pipil populations. 
For the last several years, I have built collaborative projects focusing on the new field of Afro-Latin American Studies with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The impressive scope and depth of contributions of Afro-Latin American archaeology was the subject of a 2017 workshop I co-organized with Alejandro de la Fuente at Harvard University, which was followed in 2019 with another workshop supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard and involved 18 scholars from across the Americas. Articles in multiple languages and the forthcoming book (Afro-Latin American Archaeology: An Introduction) resulting from these workshops establish a new field of study and addresses in powerful ways fundamental anthropological questions—race, labor, power, resiliency, memory, erasure, and political and economic dynamics.