Francesco Orlandi

My academic background has fostered the integration of public and contemporary archaeologies with historical and anthropological concerns on Indigenous heritage rights in South America and across long-term, local-global scales of analysis. Since my postgraduate studies in archaeology, I have paid particular attention to the ethical and political implications of Indigenous peoples' rights-based claims in postcolonial contexts. I have integrated my formal university education with volunteering experiences among Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon (2010) and at the Madrid office of the NGO Survival International (2012). This led me to broaden my research interests and questions to subjects seldom considered in standard archaeological curricula, such as the politics of multiculturalism and recognition, ethnographic and qualitative methodologies, postcolonial studies, and international heritage law.

These combined interests have coalesced in my doctoral investigation, which was funded by the highly competitive three-year international scholarship of the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter (2016-2019). During my doctoral training, I engaged with the conceptual and practical tools of critical heritage studies and the archaeologies of the contemporary past, building on multi-sited ethnography, archival research, and multi-period archaeological survey, with an emphasis on co-creation processes and protocols of informed consent, collaboration, and the return of research findings to the Indigenous communities and organisations involved in the research. In recognition of the anthropological soundness of this methodological strategy, I was a beneficiary of the Radcliffe-Brown Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Association of Social Anthropologists in the UK (2020). My PhD thesis Heritage cosmopolitics: Archaeology, Indigeneity and Rights in Bolivia and Argentina (U Exeter, 2022) explored the historical and environmental impacts of heritage and ethnodevelopment policies on the local communities living near two iconic archaeological sites in the south-central Andes region: the World Heritage site of Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and the Sacred City of Quilmes (Tucumán, Argentina).

During my postdoctoral years, I have continued to collaborate with the Centre for the Archaeology of the Americas as a research assistant in networking projects with the University of Leiden and the University of Geneva Heritage Lab. I am also an Honorary Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. 

In 2023 and 2024, I have designed and delivered the postgraduate course 'Archaeology, Media and the Public' as an Adjunct Lecturer in the international MA curriculum Applied Critical Archaeology and Heritage (ACRA) at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna. Since July 2024, I have been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Grant Office of the University of Macerata, where I am the main coordinator of the international research cluster “Critical Heritage Studies: Restorative Justice, Digital Ethics and the Governance of Sustainability” within the framework of the EU-funded European Reform University Alliance (ERUA).