Academics at Work: Sarah Kennedy’s environmental archaeology research on power and agency in colonial Peru

Sarah Kennedy, assistant professor of archaeology and Latin American studies, uncovers materials of the past with her research — and with them, questions of lived experiences. As a zooarchaeologist, Kennedy studies past human, animal, and environmental relationships to understand how people responded to imperialism and forms of colonial power. 

Kennedy often studies food as a means of examining the past, using the identification of animal remains, plants, and ceramics found at archaeological excavations, as well as tools like the analysis of ancient DNA, to understand ancient diets and what they reveal about the lives of everyday people under colonial rule. 

“By studying food, you can often see how everyday people are resisting or continuing to persist through their normal everyday food procurement strategies,” said Kennedy. 

Kennedy’s interest in food was influenced by her childhood in rural Wyoming, where her dad worked as a wheat farmer. 

“I got to spend a lot of time outdoors as a young adult, working the land and thinking about food, production, and sustainability,” she said. “Maybe growing up in a rural community with a family focused on local agriculture also led me to want to study the everyday people of the past, the people that didn’t live in big cities or capitals, but the everyday farmers and laborers living in the rural peripheries of ancient empires.” 

Kennedy is currently involved with several projects containing similar underlying themes of everyday lived experience, persistence, and resistance under colonial power. 

Asillo Archaeological Research Project of Peru

Kennedy and several of her Carleton students began excavations this summer at a village and military fort in the Lake Titicaca Basin of southern Peru. The fort belonged to the Colla, a strong rival ethnic group to the Inca. The site where Kennedy is excavating, called Asillo, was described by Inca rulers in interviews with Spanish colonists as the location of a Colla stronghold and rebellion, although it was eventually conquered by the Inca Empire and put under colonial rule.

Kennedy’s team will be the first to excavate at Asillo, a unique site because of Inca buildings located inside the walls of the Colla fort. 

“The Inca, for whatever reason, established these really large, fancy buildings in Asillo and no one has excavated anything,” said Kennedy. “They’re just strange anomalies.” 

Kennedy and her students plan to radiocarbon date the materials at the site and hope to learn the function of the Inca buildings. Among the many possibilities of the site’s function are as a war monument of the Inca victory over the Colla rebellion, a royal estate for an Inca king, or an embassy where the two groups had diplomatic relations. 

“People know less about the Inca in Lake Titicaca because the environment is really tough to do archaeology in. It’s hard to walk around — it’s about 12,000–14,000 feet in elevation,” said Kennedy. “Generally, Inca archaeologists are still trying to figure out the real nature of Inca state control in far-flung peripheral territories.” 

As the Colla people built different types of houses, had different pottery, and ate different foods than the Inca, Kennedy expects that the materials at the site, and the time period they came from, will shed light on the nature of the relationship between the Colla and the Inca. 

“What are the narratives that recorded history tells about the Inca? And what are the narratives of the everyday people living under Inca ‘control?’” wondered Kennedy. 

El Proyecto Arqueológico Medio Ambiental (PAMA)

Kennedy examines similar questions about conquest, resistance, and imperialism through her second main project on environmental archaeology, El Proyecto Arqueológico Medio Ambiental (PAMA). 

PAMA, a continuation of Kennedy’s PhD work at the University of Pittsburgh, studies silver mines and refineries in Peru, where Indigenous people were forced to work under Spanish colonialism. 

“It was a really coercive abuse of labor,” said Kennedy, “but it was also a time period when you could get rich in silver mining. There was a policy where you could mine and refine silver one day a week and keep everything that you mined or refined on that day for yourself. Colonial administrators would get angry, because the miners would pretend to mine for six days and on the seventh day, they would all of a sudden ‘find’ all of the silver and take it as their own. In actuality, they had already found it and just waited until it was their free day to take it. There was also a lot of smuggling that happened in the refineries, where people worked with their local networks to smuggle out bars of silver to get rich on and sell.” 

Some people may have chosen to work in mining for this reason, but the sites have left lasting legacies of environmental degradation and destruction. 

Kennedy and her collaborators documented the sites using GPS mapping, soil composition data, and water and vegetation sampling, finding that the levels of lead, mercury, and arsenic in the soil surpassed risk levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

The mission of Kennedy’s project was to inform people living in the areas about the contamination and come up with solutions. 

“Knowing that those sites were so contaminated, I couldn’t not try to think of a way to remediate that,” said Kennedy. 

Archaeology Ethics

Kennedy’s third major project is one of ethics. With several collaborators at other universities, along with recent Carleton graduate Ezra Kucur ’25, Kennedy is looking at course descriptions and syllabi to understand how ethics is taught at undergraduate universities. Sampling both predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and minority serving institutions (MSIs), the team found that a relatively low percentage of undergraduate anthropology programs had required ethics courses for the major. The study is currently awaiting publication.

“My research has really influenced the way I teach archaeology: focusing on ethics, who is harmed or helped by archaeology, who gets to do archaeology, and who gets to interpret the past,” said Kennedy.

This spring, she co-taught ARCN 112: Archaeology of Native North America with Franky Jackson, an anthropologist and tribal historic preservation officer for the nearby Prairie Island Indian Community. 

“We wanted to really highlight the role of modern Indigenous groups in historic preservation efforts, especially around controversial and unethical issues related to on-the-ground interpretations of NAGPRA [the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act],” said Kennedy. “Many museums and universities still have collections of human skeletal remains from Native American graves and cemeteries, and tribal nations continue to fight for the release and repatriation of their ancestors’ remains.” 

Kennedy is also working to make archaeology more publicly accessible. In 2021, she established the Carleton Archaeological Research Collection of Animal Specimens (CARCAS), which 3D scans animal bones and skulls to make identification of animal remains at archaeological sites easier, especially from remote field sites. 

Kennedy’s interdisciplinary research and teaching efforts underscore many trends in the current archaeological discipline. 

“The field of archaeology is well-positioned to take lessons from our shared human past and apply them to present and future problems in human society, such as climate change, warfare, forced migration, inequality, and colonization,” said Kennedy.