Cosmopolitan Meanings of Old Spanish Fields: Historical Archaeology of a Maroon Community in Southwest Florida

Teaching Race with Optimism and Hope

“…Much of my graduate research focused not on continuing that argument but on using the argument to historicize social differences in the eastern Mediterranean in order to open up the past for positive possibilities. The engagement with those critiques of racism continued into the present in my recent research on marronage in Florida (Baram 2022). The ontology comes from the timing of Professor Smedley's (1993) Race in North America: The Evolution of a Worldview just as the opportunity to teach on race opened up at New College.…”

Social geographies, the practice of marronage and the archaeology of absence in colonial Mexico

“…Deagan and Landers 1999; Thompson 2006; Price 1983). The archaeology of marronage was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, and through a combined analysis of material assemblages and historical documentation, studies have shown that these groups were cosmopolitan associations with multiple, shifting, political ties to other colonial groups (Agorsah 2007; Allen 1998; Baram 2012; La Rosa Corzo 2005; Ferreira 2015; Orser and Funari 2001; Kusimba 2015; Marshall 2015; Ngwenyama 2007; Sayers, Burke and Henry 2007; Sayers 2014; Weik 1997; 2012). Archaeological studies of Maroons have nonetheless been few since many Maroons formed small nomadic groups whose intention was to be materially imperceptible, making them difficult to detect with conventional archaeological approaches (Norton and Espenshade 2007), and established themselves in places seemingly as inconvenient for archaeologists as they were for colonial officials (Weik 2012; Baram 2012)…”

What's New? Rethinking Ethnogenesis in the Archaeology of Colonialism

“…Restall's (2004:82) study of the Spanish-colonial Yucatan documents "Maya" communities that have never fully embraced this ethnonym and in practice have a muted sense of ethnic identity: "In a sense, then, the Maya struggled for centuries in the face of steady opposition against their own ethnogenesis." Hughes (2012) and Baram (2012) argue that social life in colonial and postcolonial Florida was characterized by cosmopolitanism, in which social actors held multiple citizenships and performed overlapping identities, rather than ethnogenesis. Both in the past and today, the shared communal identity of "local" among many Hawai'ian residents cuts across diverse racial and ethnic identities without muting or erasing these differences ( Barna 2013;Kraus-Friedberg 2008).…”

“…Overwhelmingly, archaeological studies of ethnogenesis focus on the subaltern: those communities and populations whose lives and cultures were disrupted by macroscale political processes, including colonization, enslavement, displacement, forced migration, and economic deprivation. Ethnogenesis, in this view, is a weapon of the weak (Scott 1985), a way of authentically remaking culture under circumstances beyond a community's control (Clifford 2004), and an outcome of the shared struggle to resist and survive the dehumanizing forces of domination ( Baram 2012;Gibble 2014;Hill 1996bHill , 2013Matthews et al 2002;Weik 2009Weik , 2012Weisman 2007). Yet as Hu (2013) notes, ethnogenesis does not only occur as a struggle against institutionalized inequalities; it is also a strategy for legitimizing or maintaining unequal access to power or resources.…”