Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15) at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World: An Interview with Dr. Jordi Rivera Prince
Note from the author: We recognize that the identities that make up “Latinidad” are complex. For the purposes of this interview, individuals who may identify as Latino/Latine/Latinx are referred to as “Latino(s)” unless otherwise specified by themselves. For more information on the origin of terms such as “Latinidad” and “Latinx,” please see this source by the University of Missouri’s Cambio Center.
For Hispanic Heritage Month the Joukowsky Institute had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jordi Rivera Prince (she/her/ella), a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Anthropology and a Faculty Fellow at the Joukowsky Institute. Rivera Prince is a bioarchaeologist and mortuary archaeologist with a specialty in the coastal Andes. Her research specialties include fishing communities, social inequality, critical knowledge production, and equity in archaeological practice. However, she did not start out wanting to be a bioarchaeologist: when she started her first semester of undergrad at University of Pennsylvania, she immediately declared a degree in Biological Anthropology.
“I grew up when [the tv show] Bones was really popular, and I wanted to be Temperance Brennan [a forensic anthropologist],” Rivera Prince said, and recounted that she nearly finished all but one of her required credits by sophomore year. “I very much went into it!” When she graduated from UPenn, she received an internship with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History working in their Physical Anthropology Section. It was on one of her first days on the job that she discovered a love for bioarchaeology; when present for the opening of individuals in cast iron coffins from Congressional Cemetery with the permission of their families, one of the Institution’s specialists who had done genealogical work showed Rivera Prince a photograph of the individual whose remains they were studying.
“That blew my mind,” Rivera Prince said, “[with bioarchaeology] I liked it because you are asking questions about people and exploring those questions through human remains,” the material remains of the people themselves. She pursued a Fulbright Open Research Fellowship after her year-long work at the Smithsonian, traveling to Perú to work with the Facultad de Arqueología de la Universidad Nacional de Trujillo. In 2020 she got her Masters in Anthropology from University of Florida, where she eventually got a PhD. Her dissertation was a bioarchaeological study of Salinar cemetery in Huanchaco, Moche Valley, Perú (ca. 400-200 BCE). She documents the life of Salinar fishing communities following the collapse of the Chavín sphere of influence, and the emergence of social inequality in Peru.
When asked about what drew her to this research, she reflects on how her childhood and culture impacts her work. Growing up ten minutes from the coast of Lake Michigan in the small town of Holland, Michigan, Rivera Prince’s life “has always been oriented towards water.” Her grandfather was a fisherman and taught her how to fish, and her family in the port city Acapulco, Mexico had instilled in her an appreciation for “how intimate water is in shaping worldviews.”
Her upbringing affirmed her passion for “[making] sure what I do is legible to the communities I am researching.” As a part of this mission, she publishes work in both Spanish and English, and pursues community-based archaeological projects such as her work on the North Coast of Perú. Furthermore, knowledge sharing and visibility of archaeologists of color is an important tenet of her archaeological practice. Rivera Prince had “never met an archaeologist” until she was in college, and realized that the inequality of who gets to conduct archaeological research goes deeper than in the present. “You cannot understand inequality in the past without understanding how inequality in the present [impacts the discipline].”
In the United States, approximately 5% of all doctorates awarded in archaeology go to individuals self-identified as Latino and US Citizens/residents, regardless of gender and race. (Rivera Prince 2024a; Rivera Prince 2024b) For Rivera Prince, a Mexican American woman of color, this lack of visibility in the discipline is something she is working to change. In her class ARCH 0500, Introduction to Anthropological Archaeology, she places an emphasis on teaching work by marginalized voices within the academic field. She exposes students new to the discipline to Indigenous Archaeologies, Black Feminist Archaeology, community archaeology, and much more. When asked why this is important to her, Rivera Prince replied: “I taught…all the things I wished I would have found sooner, I treated all of them as equal within the canon … if we want the discipline to grow and change for the better, this is something we can do within the classroom.”
“I do really love teaching,” Rivera Prince said, stating one of the proudest moments of her career has been reading the reflections of students from her ARCH 0500 class. Many students expressed “they understood how archaeology could be used to help their communities, and [that] they see themselves in archaeology in a way they couldn’t beforehand.” To her, that is a rewarding aspect of being an archaeologist.
Currently, Dr. Rivera Prince is conducting a series of community based projects, such the North Burial Ground Documentation Project being co-run with the Director of North Burial Ground Annalisa Heppner. For more information on Dr. Jordi Rivera Prince’s current research, please visit her personal website.
Written by Christina Miles (`25), Records and Collections Assistant at the JIAAW, and student of Anthropological Archaeology (A.B.) at Brown University. Christina studies mortuary landscapes and placemaking in Freedom Colonies of East Texas.
