Whose Heritage? Using material culture to celebrate AANHPI heritage month

Welcome to the Alexandria Archive Institute and Open Context‘s Data Story Shorts! In celebration of Asian and Pacific American (AAPI) Heritage Month (AAPIHM) or Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month (AANHPIHM), in this short I’ll use one of Open Context’s projects to consider the complexity of celebrating this heritage month. Specifically, I’ll use the Asian Stoneware Jars data publication, contributed by Dr. Peter Grave.

For this short, I’ll be exercising my data literacy skills to explore the Asian Stoneware Jars project. I use the data to focus on relevant sites and then search for more context about them online. After that, I’ll see if I can answer the question “Can this data set be used to celebrate AANHPIHM?” As a reader, you can follow this research narrative Data Story Short to learn more about exploring data sets, doing background research, and evaluating research questions.

What’s our question?

Beyond the problems inherent to all heritage and history months, the term AAPI has its own complexity. It celebrates the heritage of people descended from every culture on the largest continent and the cultures of the peoples of the Pacific. That covers the heritages of “60 per cent of the world’s population” (UNFPA 2025). That’s a lot of people whose heritage we’re going to celebrate in just one 31 day period.

However, it’s important to remember that AANHPIHM is about people who live within the United States that are descended from folks in Asia and the Pacific. In addition, I’ve seen many articles celebrating AANHPIHM that focus on the heritages of Asian Americans and, purposefully or not, forget to include Indigenous Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islander Americans, such as CHamorus, when they discuss the kinds of celebrations they plan to do. As an American of Southeast Asian heritage who is aware of this problem, I wanted to dive into these waters through something I’m familiar with, material culture data.

What patterns do the data contain?

I decided to do this by exploring the data publication Asian Stoneware Jars. This data set, available on Open Context, includes data from near San Francisco, California, and from the Northern Mariana Islands, which is a Pacific Commonwealth of the United States. Due to their locations, I think those sites are most likely to relate to AANHPI heritage. The data publication also includes observations about artifacts recovered from across Asia but because I’m focusing on folks of Asian, Pacific Island, and Native Hawaiian descent in America the materials from those other contexts are less likely to relate to those people, unless we do more testing.

Based on where people recovered these jars and jar fragments, I wanted to explore whether these belongings represent both Pacific Islander American, specifically Indigenous CHamoru, and Asian American heritage, likely Filipine/o/a/x heritage. Based on the data set, there was no evidence for these pieces having a relationship to Hawaii, so they’re unlikely to be considered part of Native Hawaiian heritage.

One of the recovered pieces was the jar fragment seen in the preceding photo. It came from the Drakes Bay Site, near San Francisco, California. This sherd, which is a word archaeologists like to use instead of pottery fragment, dated to 1579/1595 AD. Based on the location of recovery, what the object is, and the date that the wreck occurred this sherd, and others like it, are definitely pieces of Asian American heritage. I came to this conclusion because they are Asian-made goods in North America.

In addition, their potential date corresponds to the earliest European-documented evidence for Filipine sailors on Spanish vessels arriving in North America. So it’s possible that these were pieces of belongings associated with Asian sailors. For me, this creates a connection with Asian American heritage through the jars’ origins and, potentially, through their use by people of Asian heritage.

Now, what about the jars from the Northern Mariana Islands? These whole stoneware jars came from the 1638 Concepcion shipwreck. The available online sources for the wreck suggest that 28 of the 40 survivors were Spanish and that there were some Filipine, Black, and possibly other Indigenous crew associated with the vessel (Tan 2020).

So, to whose heritage do the jars from the Concepcion belong?

Let’s look at what we know. First, Asian people probably made the jars. Second, they were from a Spanish ship. Third, that crew included some Asian and potentially CHamoru sailors. Fourth, the ship sank off the coast of the island of Saipan, inhabited at the time primarily by CHamorus, who salvaged the wreck. Fifth, in the late 20th century other people recovered the jars as part of cargo from the shipwreck during a commercial salvage recovery project.

CHamorus knew the location of the wreck and, as its wreckage washed ashore, used those materials. While not every piece that came ashore got used by a CHamoru, the wreck tells the story of how CHamorus were, for better or worse, part of the trade routes of the Pacific. So for me, these jars are part of CHamoru heritage.

Okay but, whose heritage?

What makes something part of someone’s heritage? Is it origin, use, where someone found it, or something else? We’d probably get 10 different answers if we asked 10 different heritage professionals. And that’s ok! What I liked about this data set is that it makes us consider those questions.

The lifecycle of these jars encompasses the complexity of AAPI heritage because they are related to different potential Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in different ways when we consider origin, use, location, and other factors to answer the question of “whose heritage”.

The collection also tells a story of how colonialism created, or superseded, relationships between different groups. It reminds us that while we’re celebrating people’s heritage in the United States, one of the reasons we’re doing so is because of complicated and layered colonial relationships.

Heritage is often complex. And for me, celebrating it requires us to embrace its challenges rather than shy away from them. Based on this data publication and the background contextual information I found from online academic sources, I think people can use this data set to celebrate AANHPIHM. However, people should use it knowing that these data are only the material culture heritage of Filipino Americans and CHamoru Americans.

After seeing my exploration of this data publication, consider how you’ve been celebrating AANHPI heritage month. What can you do to acknowledge the complex relationships between the many peoples whose heritage is celebrated every May? Or consider whether a different data publication might be used at a different time of year to celebrate your own heritage!

References and further reading

We list the references in order of appearance in the text. We also include suggestions for further reading or related material on the topics presented. If any URLs navigate to a broken page, please check the Wayback Machine for an archived copy of the material.

Explore some data publications over at Open Context: opencontext.org

Learn more about the Data Story Shorts at: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2025/01/24/introducing-data-story-shorts/

Or Check out our full length Digital Data Stories here: https://doi.org/10.6078/M74F1NW0

Learn more about Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month at: https://asianpacificheritage.gov/

The US Department of State had a cool blurb celebrating AANHPI heritage month, check out this archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220516004823/https://www.state.gov/in-celebration-of-asian-american-native-hawaiian-and-pacific-islander-heritage-month/

This Data Story Short focuses on the data publication Asian Stoneware Jars you can find it at: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7057CVH 

Learn more a bit about the problems with heritage months at: https://blog.leeandlow.com/2014/11/25/the-problem-with-ethnic-heritage-months/

You can also explore the specific issues with the AAPI grouping at: https://www.today.com/news/how-inclusive-aapi-pacific-islanders-debate-label-t218371

Another exploration of those issues is available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20221208023749/ucpress.edu/blog/27781/apa-heritage-month-a-problem-in-three-parts/

Check out population trends in Asia and the Pacific from UNFPA, which is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency: https://asiapacific.unfpa.org/en/topics/population-trends-9#:~:text=Population%20trends-,The%20Asia%20and%20the%20Pacific%20region%20is%20home%20to%2060,also%20contains%20some%20of%20…

Learn more about CHamoru peoples and how modern borders separated their communities: https://www.guampedia.com/chamorros-a-people-divided/

Explore Wikipedia for a background on the CHamoru people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamorro_people

The term Filipino encompasses many peoples, learn more about them at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipinos

If you are unfamiliar with who we mean when we include Native Hawaiian people learn a bit more at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Hawaiians 

Check out the Drakes Bay National Historic Landmark at  https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/news/newsreleases_20161012_drakes_nhl_dedication.htm

Get an introduction to the Concepcion over at: https://www.guampedia.com/galleon-concepcion/

Tan 2020 is an academic citation for the East Carolina University Master’s thesis Manila Galleons in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: An Analysis of the Cultural Impacts on Santa Margarita and Nuestra Señora de la Concepción by Aleck Danielle Tan (2020), you can find a copy at: https://thescholarship.ecu.edu/bitstream/handle/10342/8598/Tan_Thesis_Final.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Gain access to any broken links by getting an archived copy from the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/

Credits

Unless otherwise specified, this work and its components are shared under a CC BY license. To attribute this Data Story or any of its parts, please use our suggested citation:

Paulina F. Przystupa, 2025, “How to Make Your Own (Archaeological) Book Club,” Data Stories Program, Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context, Published Online, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7RF5S6S.

In order of appearance, we use the following credited and licensed images in this work:

“AAI-OC_DataStoryShortPublished_Header-WhoseHeritage” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the Data Literacy Program (DLP) / CC BY. It includes “UNE373 copy.jpg from Oceania/Northern Mariana Islands/Conception/UNE 373” by Peter Grave from Asian Stoneware Jars published on Open Context (https://opencontext.org/media/017fc355-b83a-4f9a-1893-e940f2e08355 ) / CC BY, which also appears on its own later in the article. 

“PacificMap” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP created under Fair Use in 2022 from a Screencapture of Open Context’s Summary Map for the distribution of the materials from the data publication Asian Stoneware Jars by Peter Grave from Open Context (DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7057CVH ) / CC BY as of 2022. The map is centered on the Pacific ocean and appears on an interactive Leaflet map with other map elements that are copyright MapBox.com, Google.Com, and Imagery from NASA.

“UNE388.JPG from Americas/United States/California/Drakes Bay Site/UNE 388”. In Asian Stoneware Jars. Peter Grave (Ed). Released: 2013-03-06. Open Context. <https://opencontext.org/media/b22982f5-9af0-46ec-1991-67a44cd36e78> ARK (Archive): https://n2t.net/ark:/28722/k2h41jq9d / CC BY.

“UNE373 copy.jpg from Oceania/Northern Mariana Islands/Conception/UNE 373”. In Asian Stoneware Jars. Peter Grave (Ed). Released: 2013-03-06. Open Context. <https://opencontext.org/media/017fc355-b83a-4f9a-1893-e940f2e08355> ARK (Archive): https://n2t.net/ark:/28722/k2j67910g / CC BY.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank AAI staff for reading drafts of this Data Story Short back in 2022 for its original publication and for their encouragement to update and turn it into a Data Story Short. This is Version 2.0, published May 2025, and is an update to the original piece published in May 2022. Updates include: the addition of subheadings, updated language, the creation of additional reference and crediting sections, a new introduction, and the replacement of certain links with archived versions. The original author conducted these updates. In addition, most changes align with this article’s formal transition into a Data Story Short. We will note future updates and changes here.