A Matter of Posession

Virtual Conference | April 21 2026

In A Matter of Possession (Una Cuestión de Posesión), archaeologist Reniel Rodríguez speaks about the Las Piedras collection of Father Nazario, part of which is housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where the objects are classified as fakes even though the museum has never studied them. Building on this video, we will discuss the crisis of storage and preservation of historical material in Puerto Rico, the looting and private collecting of ancestral material, and forms of reclamation and connection through artistic and archival practices.

Reniel Rodríguez

Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Utuado Campus. He is the author of Rethinking Puerto Rican Precolonial History (University of Alabama Press, 2010) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Amanda Guzmán

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She specializes in the anthropology of museums, with a focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of intercultural representation and the formation of national identities.

Gabriel Maldonado

Master’s student in the archaeology program at CEAPRC. He earned his bachelor’s degree (B.A.) in sculpture from Colorado College in Colorado, United States. Coming from a background in contemporary visual arts practices, he has undertaken research projects on wooden boatbuilding in the Caribbean and Caribbean navigation since pre-Columbian times, titled Canoas, Cayucos y Balsas.

Paulina Asencio

She is a Mexican researcher and curator. She is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University (NYU), where she completed the Certificate in Culture and Media (Tisch School of the Arts), with an emphasis on ethnographic film and documentary practices.

Resources shared during the panel: