The Early Americas: History and Culture

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas <UN> The Early Americas: History and Culture Series Editors Corinne L. Hofman (Leiden University) Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen (Leiden University) Editorial Board Sonya Atalay (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Benoit Bérard (Université des Antilles) Alexander Geurds (University of Oxford, Leiden University, and University of Colorado) Nikolai Grube (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität) Rosemary A. Joyce (University of California) Jason Laffoon (Leiden University) Leonardo López Luján (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico) Eduardo Neves (Universidade de São Paulo) Karoline Noack (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität) Stephen Rostain (cnrs - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Angel Iván Rivera Guzmán (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico) Roberto Valcárcel Rojas (Centro de Investigaciones, Servicios Ambientales y Tecnológicos (cisat), Cuba) volume 9 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/eahc <UN> Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas Archaeological Case Studies Edited by Corinne L. Hofman Floris W.M. Keehnen leiden | boston <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc-nd 4.0 License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: Precolonial and early colonial ceramics from the Cibao Valley, Hispaniola. Chicoid anthropozoomorphic adornos characterizing twelfth- to fifteenth-century indigenous ceramics and mixed Amerindian, African, and European ceramics typical of early colonial Spanish towns in the Americas (Photos by Marlieke Ernst and Menno L.P. Hoogland, image by Menno L.P. Hoogland). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1875-3264 ISBN 978-90-04-39245-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27368-9 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> Contents Preface: What’s in a Name? vii Charles R. Cobb Acknowledgments X List of Illustrations xi Notes on Contributors xv 1 Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas 1 Floris W.M. Keehnen, Corinne L. Hofman, and Andrzej T. Antczak 2 Colonial Encounters in Lucayan Contexts 32 Mary Jane Berman and Perry L. Gnivecki 3 Treating ‘Trifles’: the Indigenous Adoption of European Material Goods in Early Colonial Hispaniola (1492–1550) 58 Floris W.M. Keehnen 4 Contact and Colonial Impact in Jamaica: Comparative Material Culture and Diet at Sevilla la Nueva and the Taíno Village of Maima 84 Shea Henry and Robyn Woodward 5 European Material Culture in Indigenous Sites in Northeastern Cuba 102 Roberto Valcárcel Rojas 6 Breaking and Making Identities: Transformations of Ceramic Repertoires in Early Colonial Hispaniola 124 Marlieke Ernst and Corinne L. Hofman 7 Rancherías: Historical Archaeology of Early Colonial Campsites on Margarita and Coche Islands, Venezuela 146 Andrzej T. Antczak, Ma. Magdalena Antczak, Oliver Antczak, and Luis A. Lemoine Buffet 8 Santa María de la Antigua del Darién: the Aftermath of Colonial Settlement 175 Alberto Sarcina <UN> vi Contents 9 Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in Early Colonial El Salvador 197 William R. Fowler and Jeb J. Card 10 Hybrid Cultures: the Visibility of the European Invasion of Caribbean Honduras in the Sixteenth Century 221 Russell N. Sheptak and Rosemary A. Joyce 11 Exotics for the Lords and Gods: Lowland Maya Consumption of European Goods along a Spanish Colonial Frontier 238 Jaime J. Awe and Christophe Helmke 12 Resignification as Fourth Narrative: Power and the Colonial Religious Experience in Tula, Hidalgo 263 Shannon Dugan Iverson 13 Indigenous Pottery Technology of Central Mexico during Early Colonial Times 284 Gilda Hernández Sánchez 14 War and Peace in the Sixteenth-Century Southwest: Objected-Oriented Approaches to Native-European Encounters and Trajectories 308 Clay Mathers 15 ‘Beyond the Falls’: Amerindian Stance towards New Encounters along the Wild Coast (AD 1595–1627) 333 Martijn van den Bel and Gérard Collomb 16 Colonial Encounters in the Southern Lesser Antilles: Indigenous Resistance, Material Transformations, and Diversity in an Ever-Globalizing World 359 Corinne L. Hofman, Menno L.P. Hoogland, Arie Boomert, and John Angus Martin Epilogue: Situating Colonial Interaction and Materials: Scale, Context, Theory 385 Maxine Oland Index 395 <UN> Preface: What’s in a Name? Charles R. Cobb In a notable article on the perils of typological nomenclature as applied to the European colonial era, Stephen Silliman (2005) took me and other North American scholars to task for our reliance on the expression “contact” – as in contact-period archaeology. As he observed, by using the term contact rather than colonialism, archaeologists were in danger of emphasizing short-term encounters over entanglements, eliding the relations of power and inequal- ity more directly implied by the concept of colonialism, and focusing on pre- defined traits over processes of hybridization and creolization. There clearly is good merit to Silliman’s concerns over the conflation of the notions of contact and colonialism. What perhaps got overlooked in his argument, however, is that North American archaeologists primarily use contact as short-hand for the first century or so of interactions between Native American and European cultures. It is not usually meant as a brief encounter shorn of history, domination, and resistance. Certainly, concepts like “contact” or “protohistoric” – and “conquest period” as frequently seen in this volume – do carry considerable semantic freight and we must be wary in how we use them. Nevertheless, I still maintain that it is ex- tremely useful to delineate distinctive chronological and spatial pulses in the colonial experience. And I am gratified to say that I think the contributions to this pathbreaking volume support my argument. The “Early Colonial Americas” al- luded to in the title – more or less spanning the late 1400s to early 1600s CE in the larger circum-Caribbean region – embody relations between Native Americans and Europeans that are wholly different than for other times and places. The authors demonstrate that the earliest phase of European colonialism in the Americas was manifested as a highly uneven event. The event can be characterized as a large wave of conquistadores, clergy, and colonists – largely from Iberia – rapidly roiling into a newfound world in the decades following Columbus’ first landing in 1492. Moving down from a panoramic to a histori- cally granular viewpoint, though, it is obvious that any hope of regimenting this westward surge by the Spanish or Portuguese Crowns was thwarted by the complex personalities and objectives that comprised the many expeditions and colonies. Equally important, the immense variety of indigenous societies that awaited guaranteed that each European landing on the American main- land and the Caribbean islands would spark a unique trajectory of cultural interactions. In the material world, the outcome was a form of normative <UN> viii Preface: What’s in a Name? flexibility, where attempts to meld the old and the new by a variety of Native American and European cultures led to complex bends and folds of similarity and difference. A case in point is the Spanish gift kit, described in several of the chapters herein. In his original definition of the gift kit, Brain (1975) noted that several types of objects and materials seemed to be consistently favored by a wide range of Native American societies in southeastern North America, leading him to conclude that Spanish explorers had arrived at a fairly standardized suite of gifting items. These included such things as small, copper alloy bells and glass beads. In a subsequent study, DePratter and Smith (1980) relied on an extensive analysis of written accounts to demonstrate that, rather than relying on a uni- form package of gifts, European expeditions maintained a more flexible inven- tory with the idea that they could address variation in taste and consumption patterns between Native American leaders who they hoped to draw to their cause. In turn, indigenous groups used and modified these objects in incredibly diverse ways. As displayed through the gift kit, neither Europeans nor Native Americans represented homogeneous groups with similar beliefs, strategies, and practices. So, yes, we

Load more