Brendan Weaver
Visiting Assistant Professor
Visual & Material Cultures of Latin America
PhD Vanderbilt University
Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Brendan Weaver is an historical archaeologist focusing on material culture and the built environment, including visual arts and architecture, among indigenous and African-descended peoples of Latin America. His current research is focused on power, aesthetics, and memory among enslaved Afro-Andeans in Spanish colonial and early republican Peru. Prior to coming to FSU in the fall of 2023, he was a Lecturer of African Diaspora Archaeology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2022-23), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Archaeology Center (California, 2018-2022), the Mellon Institute Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at Berea College (Kentucky, 2016-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland, 2015-2016).
Since 2009, Weaver has directed the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (PAHN), centered on Nasca’s Ingenio Valley, the first project to archaeologically study the African diaspora in what is today the Republic of Peru. The interdisciplinary project explores the material culture, political aesthetics, and quotidian experience of enslaved African-descended laborers at two 17th- and 18th-century wine estates formerly owned by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) on Peru’s South Coast. His forthcoming monograph, Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands: An Archaeology of Slavery and Aesthetics at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru, results from this research and asks two central questions: 1) What were the material conditions for the production of enslaved subjectivities on these estates? and 2) as a result of this material experience, how did enslaved actors produce and engage in meaning making? Both of these questions are advanced through innovative aesthetic and semiotic approaches to power and enslaved praxis.
Selected Publications
Weaver, Brendan J. M., Lizette A. Muñoz, & Karen Durand. 2023. “From Slavery to Servitude: Transformations and Continuities in Hacienda Labor, Wellbeing, and Foodways in Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nasca.” Latin American Antiquity.
Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2022. “Reflections on ‘material histories’ and the archaeology of slavery in Peru.” Colonial Latin American Review 31(4):591-598.
Weaver, Brendan J. M., Miguel Fhon, & Lady Santana. 2022. “Heritage and the Archaeology of Afro-Peru: Community Engagement in the Valleys of Nasca.” Historical Archaeology 56(1):131-152.
Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2021. “‘The Grace of God and Virtue of Obedience’: The Archaeology of Slavery and the Jesuit Hacienda Systems of Nasca, Peru, 1619-1767.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 8(3):430-453.
Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2021. “An Archaeology of the Aesthetic: Slavery and Politics at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31(1):111-118.
Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2020. “Ghosts of the Haciendas: Memory, Architecture, and the Architecture of Memory in the Post-Hacienda Era of Southern Coastal Peru.” Ethnohistory 67(1):149-173.
Weaver, Brendan J. M., Lizette A. Muñoz, & Karen Durand. 2019. “Supplies, Status, and Slavery: The Contested Aesthetics of Provisioning at the Jesuit Haciendas of Nasca.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23(4):1011-1038.
Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2018. “Rethinking the Political Economy of Slavery: The Hacienda Aesthetic at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 52(1):111-127.