Join the CIAMS community for a lecture by Dr. Sam Holley Kline on Thursday, October 8 in Stimson Hall G01. Lecture title: "Chewing gum and archaeological labor in the Maya region, 1910–1940.” Reception to follow with refreshments provided. 

During the early twentieth century, the development of Maya archaeology depended on the operations of the chicle industry. Examining the relationships between archaeology and industry at the regional scale illustrates how the operations of the latter shaped the former. In this talk, I assess these relationships along three lines: the attributions of site discovery to individual chicle tappers (chicleros) in archaeologists’ publications; how chicle contractors’ infrastructure facilitated archaeological research; and how the employment of chicleros in excavation illustrates the circulation of ideas of race between archaeology and the chicle industry. I conclude by considering the ethical implications of this relationship for contemporary practice.

Sam Holley-Kline was most recently an Assistant Clinical Professor in the University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) and co-editor (with Allison Mickel) of “Histories of Labor in Archaeology,” a 2024 special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. Holley-Kline’s research has been supported by funding from Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Council of Learned Societies.