Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas

Abstract

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

Where strangers met: evidence for early commerce at LaSoye Point, Dominica

“…Evidence of such early interactions has been identified on three islands: Plage de Roseau, Guadeloupe (Richard 2001); Argyle, St Vincent (Hofman et al . 2019); and La Poterie, Grenada (Hofman & Hoogland 2018). These sites demonstrate how the material innovations and economic relationships of such engagements were not one-sided.…”

Complex landscape biographies: palimpsests of Fort-Liberté, Haiti

“…Recent studies have focused on the indigenous plantscape dynamics that benefitted the early Europeans' survival and domination of the Caribbean (Pagán-Jiménez et al, 2020) and the pre-colonial landscape that was changed over time by colonial activity (e.g. Bain et al, 2018;Castilla-Beltrán et al, 2020Hofman & Keehnen, 2019;Rivera-Collazo, 2015;Rivera-Collazo et al, 2018;Samson & Cooper, 2015).…”

Indigenous Routes and Resource Materialities in the Early Spanish Colonial World: Comparative Archaeological Approaches

“…The chronicler Guillermo Coma also notes that Gorvalán crossed the Yaque with the help of Indigenous guides and boats and continued through the southern side of the valley based on their friendly relationships with local caciques (León Guerrero 2000:270). These resulting networks of trails and social connections, underpinned by an initial mobility regime based on Indigenous porterage labor and limited numbers of Old World animals, would continue to shape the initial Spanish presence in the Cibao as they shifted from exchanging for gold to exploiting the alluvial gold placers themselves (Hofman and Keehnen 2019).…”

“…There have been renewed calls over the past two decades for new comparative perspectives that tackle the large-scale nature of Spanish colonialism in the Americas as a historical process by adopting wider analytical scales to understand the complex dynamics of the period (e.g., Deagan 2003; Hofman and Keehnen 2019; Van Buren 2010; Voss 2008). The archaeology of mobility offers one such potentially fruitful comparative perspective (Beaudry and Parno 2013), one that pushes us beyond the scales of the site and the bounded region and encourages us to look at the wider forms of connectivity that tied the Spanish colonial world together.…”