PAQuie (El Proyecto Antropológico de Quiechapa, Anthropological Project of Quiechapa) began in Summer 2013 when my collegue Juan and I visited the town of San Pedro Mártir Quiechapa in Oaxaca, Mexico to see if it was feasible to do an archaeological survey of the region. With the approval of the town authorities, we returned in the Summer of 2014 to do some ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork focused on agriculture and ritual pilgrimage and to prepare for a larger archaeological project. In Summer 2015, I received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) and returned in January 2016 for an archaeological survey of the region investigating land-use change during the Postclassic period (A.D. 800 - 1521).
PAQuie is a multidiciplinary research project using - archaeology, ethnography, linguistic dialect mapping, archival research, oral histories, satellite remote sensing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) - to understand more about the people living in the region and their role within the broader context of southern Mexico in prehispanic times. PAQuie has had many members including: undergraduate student volunteers, undergraduate student researchers (credits earned), graduate student researchers, Mexican archaeologists. We also had the involvement of local residents of Quiechapa in our archaeological survey project. |