Carleen Sanchez
My primary specialization is as an archaeologist working at the site of La Union in Honduras where I am investigating the regional political and economic dynamics of Classic period Maya civilization (AD 250-900). My fieldwork at this site explores the relationship of this secondary center within the context of an expanding political economy centered at Copan (located 35 km away). Other areas of study that I have engaged with include the development of complex society in non-Maya Central America, stone tool analysis, and the intersections between nationalism, tourism, cultural heritage in contemporary Central America.
I am also engaged in Transnational Feminist research, a new yet growing area of study that seeks to problematize the category "Third World Woman." In particular, I examine and critique western derived feminism that fails to recognize that the legacy of European colonialism has complicated identity formation in Indigenous societies in Central America. A third area of research I am pursuing, the politics of representation, interrogates traditional gender and racial categories deployed in visual media. A current work in progress draws feminist and post-structuralist theory to deconstruct the narrative of evolution. I argue that visual representations of human evolution reflect androcentric and Eurocentric biases and reify western notions of cultural superiority. My analysis contrasts archaeological and paleoanthropological data against the visual representations of evolution to demonstrate the discordance between what we know and how it is made visible through various texts (both written and visual).
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