This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

The colonization of the Caribbean initiated a process of entanglement of people, goods, and ideas between the “New” and “Old World,” which is popularly referred to as the Columbian Exchange. This paper seeks to highlight the multiscalar and material underpinnings of this process of global importance by tracing it to its roots: the earliest encounters between the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and European colonists. We present a database, based on key Spanish historical sources, which catalogs all references to the transaction of objects between Amerindians and Europeans from AD 1492–1497. We furthermore argue for the need of a framework that is able to connect, explore, and track the structural materiality of things in encounter events. For this we suggest a combination of entanglement theory with network and substantive analyses. This multiscalar theoretical and methodological framework shows how a diverse and contextually specific network of humans and things arose in tandem with European and Amerindian attempts to establish, manipulate, and contest ties of significant personal and historical interest.

Early colonial encounters with Europeans introduced indigenous Caribbean peoples to a wide array of foreign goods and materials. Through gift-giving and exchange, objects form vital elements for negotiating the social, cultural, and material boundaries between peoples with vastly different cultural-historical backgrounds (e.g., Cipolla 2017; Gosden 2004; Maran and Stockhammer 2012; Thomas 1991). In the Caribbean, these exotic items often possessed qualities similar to or commensurable with the preexisting values of indigenous societies, facilitating their intercultural transfer and adoption (Keehnen 2011, 2012; Oliver 2000; Saunders 1999). The blending of new and traditional material expressions ushered in a period of creativity and innovation, in which the material culture repertoires of all those involved in the colonial process increasingly transformed. European trade goods were offered to indigenous Caribbean peoples within days after first encounter on 12 October 1492 at the island of San Salvador, The Bahamas (Dunn and Kelley 1989, 83-85; see also Berman and Gnivecki this volume). Christopher Columbus' log of his first voyage in addition to the accounts from traveling companions and other contemporaries vividly describe how such material interactions continued throughout the early colonial period. An analysis of a standard corpus of late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century (ethno)historical sources pertaining to the Greater Antilles and Bahamas has identified a total number of 177 such (reciprocal) gift-giving, barter, and tribute events in which objects transfer between cultural groups (Keehnen and Mol 2018). The vast majority of these transactions took place within the first 5-year period of colonial interaction and these involved at least 137 different types of objects, 61 of which are of European origin.2

No abstract