Charlotte Morris Williams

CHARLOTTE WILLIAMS, then a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received a grant in April 2021 to aid research on “The Fruits of Our Labor: Corporations, Canals, and Archaeology in the Making of American Sovereignty,” supervised by Dr. Richard Leventhal. This research investigates the role of American corporations in the early twentieth century on archaeological work in Central America, paying particular attention to the ways in which labor and industrial technologies grafted onto archaeological science, and subsequent dispossession of territory that came with archaeological enclosures. With particular attention to the intersections of the United Fruit Company with Maya archaeology of Central America, the research required an archive-based approach that followed archaeological expedition records, United Fruit Company business records, photographic archives, and maps. Case studies for archaeological sites caught in United States dominated industrial regimes include those of Piedras Negras Guatemala, Quirigua, Guatemala, Bonampak, Mexico, Zaculeu, Guatemala, and Sitio Conte, Panama. Archives consulted include the Penn Museum Archives, which house the expedition archives for Piedras Negras Guatemala and Sitio Conte Panama, the Baker Library Archives at the Harvard Business School for United Fruit Company records, the University of Tulane Middle American Research Institute for records on United Fruit Company sponsored archaeological work and consultation with their map collection, the Carnegie Institute Archives of Washington DC for information on the intersections of US government and private enterprise sponsored research, and the John Alden Mason archives at the American Philosophical Society.