Kacey C. Grauer

My goal is to build an archaeology of environmental justice that merges methods from environmental archaeology with insights from political ecology and Indigenous knowledge. Focusing on the Maya region, my work examines how Indigenous ontologies enabled equal access to water during periods of rapid political and environmental change. Contrary to settler-colonial logics of resource extraction, ancient Maya engagements with environment were relational and did not place humans above the more-than-human world. My current scholarship examines how unequal water access emerged in historical and recent times through periods of political collapse, colonialism, and climate change. The goal in this work is to situate present-day environmental injustices as the products of specific historical and political processes, rather than “natural” outcomes of marginal environments.

My focus on water grew out of local farmers’ concerns about the drying landscape in northern Belize. In 2015, I co-founded the Aventura Archaeological Project, which combines archaeology and community engagement to understand the sustainable strategies that ancestral Maya people employed at the long-lived urban site of Aventura. Over five years of fieldwork, I conducted survey, drone imaging, GIS mapping, and excavations with a focus on water management features to understand how power structures impacted Maya commoner and elite relationships to water resources during episodes of drought from 750-1100 CE. Excavations examined how households of varying status levels interacted with water sources. I found that throughout Aventura’s history, commoner and elite households had comparable access to water features, which they utilized for physical and spiritual needs. These findings resonate with contemporary environmental justice movements by illustrating that equitable access to resources in times of scarcity can foster community longevity. In 2023, I co-founded the New River Island Project, which investigates a riverine Maya settlement that was occupied from Aventura’s apex up through the 17th century. This long-term project will address how riverine strategies contributed to community resilience through Classic Period political “collapse,” the onset of European colonialism, and climate change with lidar, GIS, 3D imaging, excavation, and oral histories.