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Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies
Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas brings together 15 archaeological case studies that offer new perspectives on colonial period interactions in the Caribbean and surrounding areas through a specific focus on material culture and indigenous agency.
424 pages, ebook
Published April 9, 2019
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January 18, 2025
This book is available for free to download chapter by chapter from JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/...
This is an edited anthology that includes case studies from many authors covering a large geographic and cultural area, resulting in a text about people called Indigenous, Amerindian, native, and Indios in addition to tribal and ethnic terms.
Much of the text examines sites of transculturation – "the creative, ongoing process of appropriation, revision, and survival" (a term first coined by Cuban archeologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s). Transculturation sites "show evidence of more prolonged interaction and cultural exchange between European colonizers and Indigenous people and are identified through larger quantities of introduced materials, which have been modified or reused for Indigenous purposes."
Basically, the book attempts to use material items found in archeological digs across the Caribbean and nearby regions to determine ways in which Indigenous people exercised agency and autonomy during first contact and the early colonial period. To this end there is also periodic discussion of tthnogenesis – ‘the formation of new or different sociocultural groups from the interactions, intermixtures, and antagonisms among people who took part in global processes of colonialism and slavery.’ Ethnogenesis places an emphasis on what emerges, not what precedes. For example, some Indigenous people allied with Spanish colonizers - some even becoming conquistadors themselves. The mestizo children of Spanish colonizers and Indigenous people grew to occupy a position in the hierarchy. “William Hanks … sees the attempt ‘to divide an indigenous inside from a Hispanicized exterior’ as ‘sundering the person into two parts,’ possible only if each belongs to a distinct social field” (p. 234).
The book has chapters on the Carib, Black Carib, and Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles, Lucayans of the Bahamas, the Taino of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola (Haiti & the Dominican Republic), Venezuela and Colombia, the Urabaes and Cuevas of Venezuela and Colombia, the Pipil and Lenca of El Salvador, the Zuni Pueblos, Southern Tiwa, Towa, Querecho, and Teja of the US Southwest, as well as chapters focusing on Honduras, the Yucatan and Central Mexico/Valley of Mexico, and the Guianas (including parts of modern-day Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, & northern Brazil).
This is an edited anthology that includes case studies from many authors covering a large geographic and cultural area, resulting in a text about people called Indigenous, Amerindian, native, and Indios in addition to tribal and ethnic terms.
Much of the text examines sites of transculturation – "the creative, ongoing process of appropriation, revision, and survival" (a term first coined by Cuban archeologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s). Transculturation sites "show evidence of more prolonged interaction and cultural exchange between European colonizers and Indigenous people and are identified through larger quantities of introduced materials, which have been modified or reused for Indigenous purposes."
Basically, the book attempts to use material items found in archeological digs across the Caribbean and nearby regions to determine ways in which Indigenous people exercised agency and autonomy during first contact and the early colonial period. To this end there is also periodic discussion of tthnogenesis – ‘the formation of new or different sociocultural groups from the interactions, intermixtures, and antagonisms among people who took part in global processes of colonialism and slavery.’ Ethnogenesis places an emphasis on what emerges, not what precedes. For example, some Indigenous people allied with Spanish colonizers - some even becoming conquistadors themselves. The mestizo children of Spanish colonizers and Indigenous people grew to occupy a position in the hierarchy. “William Hanks … sees the attempt ‘to divide an indigenous inside from a Hispanicized exterior’ as ‘sundering the person into two parts,’ possible only if each belongs to a distinct social field” (p. 234).
The book has chapters on the Carib, Black Carib, and Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles, Lucayans of the Bahamas, the Taino of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola (Haiti & the Dominican Republic), Venezuela and Colombia, the Urabaes and Cuevas of Venezuela and Colombia, the Pipil and Lenca of El Salvador, the Zuni Pueblos, Southern Tiwa, Towa, Querecho, and Teja of the US Southwest, as well as chapters focusing on Honduras, the Yucatan and Central Mexico/Valley of Mexico, and the Guianas (including parts of modern-day Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, & northern Brazil).
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