Archaeologies of colonialism and enslavement in Spanish, Portuguese and French America (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2009
Thornton offer a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the early years of Atlantic African slavery. Their argument is twofold: first, that the bulk of the "founding generation" of Africans in English and Dutch America came to the New World from specific and identifiable parts of West Central Africa; and second, that many of those West Central Africans, due to more than a century of interaction with Europeans, were bearers of a more or less unified "Atlantic Creole culture" that then shaped the cultural development of later generations of African slaves. This has profound implications for archaeology. The origins and changes in African/African-American cultural practices is a pressing question, and one that archaeology is well-suited to investigating. Yet conventional wisdom holds that African slaves were heirs to a variety of cultural backgrounds, so sorting out where particular groups and their practices originated at particular times is at best difficult, and at worst futile. Debates thus far have usually operated at fairly high levels of abstraction. Not so in this case: Heywood and Thornton, by pulling together a vast corpus of literature from Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English sources, construct the first leg of their argument coherently and in a way that archaeologists working on African-American origins will find compelling and useful. As for the second part, that Central Africans bore a fairly unified Atlantic Creole culture, questions remain, not through lack of scholarship but because the way the authors envision and argue for "culture" that operates on a level that is difficult to "see" archaeologically. Nevertheless, the idea is a compelling one, and this book should inspire a useful and much-needed program of archaeological investigation.
Slavery of Indigenous People in the Caribbean: An Archaeological Perspective
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2019
European enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas began in the Caribbean, quickly spreading to the rest of the continent and impacting the lives of millions. Despite its centrality to the creation of the colonial Caribbean, is still an understudied subject. This article summarizes the archaeological evidence on the topic and discusses the utility of the archaeological approach based on research conducted at the Cuban site of El Chorro de Maíta. The analyses of diet and paleodemography indicate substantial changes when compared to precolonial Indigenous populations. Indicators of ethnic diversity and geographic origin, as well as the mortuary patterns and distribution of material culture help to identify the presence of slaves. Keywords Indian slavery. Caribbean archaeology. Spanish colonialism. Cuba For many historians and philosophers the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere initiated modernity and allowed Europe and Western civilization to become the main economic-military power, as well as the predominant social and cultural paradigm, on a global level (Dussel 1994; Mignolo 2009; Quijano 2000). While the validity of this assertion is debatable there is no doubt that slavery was a fundamental tool in these historical processes (Davis 2006; Patterson 1982). When considering slavery in the New World, both general and scholarly discourses are dominated by allusions to plantations in the southern United States, the Antilles, and Brazil, or to the
The Archaeological Study of Spanish Colonialism in the Americas
Journal of Archaeological Research, 2010
Spanish colonial archaeology has undergone a fundamental shift since the Columbian Quincentenary due to the adoption of a bottom-up understanding of colonialism that emphasizes the analysis of local phenomena in a global context and the active ways in which people negotiated the processes set in motion by the conquest. This review examines five key research foci: culture change and identity, missionization, bioarchaeology, economics, and investigations of the colonial core. It ends with a consideration of ongoing challenges posed by the archaeology of colonialism, particularly the relationship of the individual to broader social processes and the emerging role of comparison.
Springer, 2015
Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America contributes to disrupt the old grand narrative of cultural contact and colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America in a wide and complete sense. This edited volume aims at exploring contact archaeology in the modern era. Archaeology has been exploring the interaction of peoples and cultures from early times, but only in the last few decades have cultural contact and material world been recognized as crucial elements to understanding colonialism and the emergence of modernity. Modern colonialism studies pose questions in need of broader answers. This volume explores these answers in Spanish and Portuguese America, comprising present-day Latin America and formerly Spanish territories now part of the United States. The volume addresses studies of the particular features of Spanish-Portuguese colonialism, as well as the specificities of Iberian colonization, including hybridism, religious novelties, medieval and modern social features, all mixed in a variety of ways unique and so different from other areas, particularly the Anglo-Saxon colonial thrust. Cultural contact studies offer a particularly in-depth picture of the uniqueness of Latin America in terms of its cultural mixture. This volume particularly highlights local histories, revealing novelty, diversity, and creativity in the conformation of the new colonial realities, as well as presenting Latin America as a multicultural arena, with astonishing heterogeneity in thoughts, experiences, practices, and material worlds.
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2022
Narratives embedded in studies of modern Spanish colonialism have conspired against a deep understanding of colonialism as a global and current issue and have influenced or limited the directions for research. By focusing on particular narratives that separate and disconnect the realities of the colonies from those of the Iberian Peninsula, this article discusses the conceptual divide between the study of colonial and early modern realms, and the tenuous connections between the archaeology of Spanish colonialism developed in America and in the Iberian Peninsula. This paper attempts to counter those insular narratives by offering a view on how even remote settlements in Ibero-America show connections that tell stories of sixteenth-century Spain and pose questions that often cannot be answered due to the lack of shared perspectives between the study of modern Spanish colonialism in America and the Iberian Peninsula. To illustrate this view, a case study focused on Ciudad del Nombre de Jesús settled during the failed Spanish plan for the fortification of the Strait of Magellan at the end of the sixteenth century is provided. The interpretation of the results of archaeological and historical lines of research allows the establishment of material connections among individuals, stories and places of the Iberian Peninsula and America. The implication of this case contributes to considering the role that archaeology can play in questioning the enduring effects of modern Spanish colonialism.
Gender and race are central to archaeological investigations of empire. In research on the Spanish colonization of the Americas, one prominent theory, the St. Augustine pattern, argues that cohabitation between Spanish men and Native American and African women in colonial households resulted in a distinctly gendered form of cultural transformation: indigenous, African, and syncretic cultural elements appear within private domestic activities associated with women; and European cultural elements are conservatively maintained in publicly visible male activities. This article reconsiders the St. Augustine pattern through analyses of new research that has revealed considerable diversity in the processes and outcomes of colonization throughout the Spanish Americas. Archaeological methodologies such as the St. Augustine pattern that rely on binary categories of analysis mask the complexity and ambiguity of material culture in colonial sites. Additionally, the abundance and ubiquity of indigenous, African, and syncretic material culture and foodstuffs in colonial households in the circum-Caribbean indicate that macroscale economic, trade, and labor relationships, rather than household composition, were important causes of colonial cultural transformation in the Americas. An analytical focus on labor in colonial settings provides a multiscalar methodology that encompasses both institutional and household-level entanglements between colonizers and colonized.
Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundations of the Americas, 1585–1660
The American Historical Review, 2008
Thornton offer a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the early years of Atlantic African slavery. Their argument is twofold: first, that the bulk of the "founding generation" of Africans in English and Dutch America came to the New World from specific and identifiable parts of West Central Africa; and second, that many of those West Central Africans, due to more than a century of interaction with Europeans, were bearers of a more or less unified "Atlantic Creole culture" that then shaped the cultural development of later generations of African slaves. This has profound implications for archaeology. The origins and changes in African/African-American cultural practices is a pressing question, and one that archaeology is well-suited to investigating. Yet conventional wisdom holds that African slaves were heirs to a variety of cultural backgrounds, so sorting out where particular groups and their practices originated at particular times is at best difficult, and at worst futile. Debates thus far have usually operated at fairly high levels of abstraction. Not so in this case: Heywood and Thornton, by pulling together a vast corpus of literature from Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English sources, construct the first leg of their argument coherently and in a way that archaeologists working on African-American origins will find compelling and useful. As for the second part, that Central Africans bore a fairly unified Atlantic Creole culture, questions remain, not through lack of scholarship but because the way the authors envision and argue for "culture" that operates on a level that is difficult to "see" archaeologically. Nevertheless, the idea is a compelling one, and this book should inspire a useful and much-needed program of archaeological investigation.