The Historical Archaeology of Buenos Aires a City at the End of the World CONTRIBUTIONS to GLOBAL HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Charles E

The Historical Archaeology of Buenos Aires A City at the End of the World CONTRIBUTIONS TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Series Editor: Charles E. Orser, Jr., Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois A HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MODERN WORLD Charles E. Orser, Jr. AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MANNERS: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Massachusetts Lorinda B. R. Goodwin AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOCIAL SPACE: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains James A. Delle BETWEEN ARTIFACTS AND TEXTS: Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective Anders Andrén DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE AND POWER: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Ecuador Ross W. Jamieson HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGIES OF CAPITALISM Edited by Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, Jr. THE HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF BUENOS AIRES: A City at the End of the World Daniel Schávelzon LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF IMPACT Social Disruption and State Formation in Southern Africa Warren R. Perry MEANING AND IDEOLOGY IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Style, Social Identity, and Capitalism in an Australian Town Heather Burke RACE AND AFFLUENCE: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture Paul R. Mullins A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery ofeach new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. The Historical Archaeology of Buenos Aires A City at the End of the World Daniel Schávelzon Universidad de Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina Translated by Alex Lomonaco Kluwer AcademicPublishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow eBook ISBN: 0-306-47160-4 Print ISBN: 0-306-46064-5 ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://www.kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://www.ebooks.kluweronline.com Foreword A program designed to examine and integrate the historical and archaeological record of a major city is a monumental challenge, In this book Daniel Schávelzon presents a summary of his efforts to meet that challenge through documentary research and twenty archaeological projects carried out in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, since 1985. To put the challenge faced by Schávelzon in perspective, the reader should know that historical archaeology in Latin America is a rela- tively new field, the first South American conference on historical archaeology having been held in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, in November 1993. At that conference, I met Schávelzon and a number of his colleagues and found that historical archaeology there is being con- ducted by those trained in anthropology, classical archaeology, history, architecture, and art history under a variety of theories from the sci- entific processual to the postprocessual approaches, as is the case in the United States. At that conference, Schávelzon expressed the need for publication outlets for the work he and his colleagues were undertaking. As a re- sult I edited sixteen volumes of a publication series, Historical Archae- ology in Latin America (South 1994 –1996), through funds provided by the Conference on Historic Site Archaeology, which I founded in 1960. Schávelzon’s report on the archaeology and history of Imprenta Coni, Buenos Aires, constituted the first volume of that series (Schável- zon 1994). Schávelzon is one of the few pioneers in historical archaeology in South America and as such he and his colleagues face many of the same challenges encountered by those North American pioneers in historical archaeology some thirty and more years ago (South 1994). One of these is the fact that most of their colleagues are primarily in- terested in prehistoric Indian archaeology, not the archaeology of the multicultural, multinational, plural-ethnic situation presented by European settlement. This limits the number of colleagues available for interactive exchange of ideas and data. There are a few citywide projects in Argentina and a few other South American countries with which Schávelzon can compare his archaeological findings. However, comparable examples require a material culture V vi Foreword taxonomy shared by colleagues using a similar theoretical framework. Without such a shared temporally consistent taxonomy quantitatively analyzed toward shared goals of understanding urban change, intercity- specific studies remain largely idiosyncratic with little predictive value. Sometimes the frontier can be a very lonely place. Consequently, in this book Shávelzon makes intrasite comparisons using percentages between various artifact groups and some intersite comparisons among his Buenos Aires sites, but comparison of his findings with results in other South American city studies must await the execution and publication of such studies, and, indeed, in many cases the establishment of governmental structures to support historical archaeology. Another challenge is the fact that the multinational, multicultural, plural-ethnic character of Buenos Aires society has resulted in a similar archaeologically complex material culture record, as demonstrated in this book. On eighteenth-century British colonial sites in North America, for instance, the ceramic picture is far simpler than it is in Buenos Aires, allowing a Mean Ceramic Date Formula to be developed to date groups of British ceramics (or Spanish majolicas on Spanish colonial sites) within a decade of their use on the site (South 1972; 71-116; 1977; 201-274). With the multinational complexity of the eighteenth-century ceramic record in Buenos Aires, such a simple dating mechanism using ceramic types is not yet available. Ceramic taxonomies are just now being worked out by Schávelzon and his colleagues to allow better temporal and national-origin comparison of ceramic assemblages from sites in various South American countries, the situation faced by historical archaeologists in the 1960s and 1970s on North American British and Spanish colonial sites. The integration of the documentary record with the archaeological record to produce interpretations valid beyond the site-specific level is always a problem. In this book, Schávelzon depends heavily on the documentary record to unfold the evolutionary development of Buenos Aires, using it as a screen against which the findings from the archaeological sites are projected. A major priority is the examination of the process of change from the sixteenth century represented by few clues to the abundant archaeological record left from the eighteenth and later centuries. The gradual accumulation in the years to come of archaeological data from various parts of Buenos Aires will allow a refinement of knowledge re- lating to the questions being asked. Thus far, however, as Schávelzon states in this book, Buenos Aires is a city with a “destiny predetermined by the international economical Foreword vii and political structures. And this is what the material culture reflects: the systematic decrease in the presence of Indian and criollo artifacts, and the permanent increase of goods originated in Europe.” Buenos Aires is a multiple and heterogeneous city “with different religions and tongues” and a city that today has a society that “is divided between luxury and misery, among those who have an easy access to massive consumption of material goods and others who survive in the utmost poverty.” It is a consumer city “at the end of the world.” In this book Schavelzon shares with us his present insights into his city as gained through his pioneering research in Buenos Aires. STANLEY SOUTH University of South Carolina South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology REFERENCES Schávelzon, Daniel, 1994, Arqueologia e Historia de la Imprenta Coni, Buenos Aires. The conference on Historic Site Archaeology. Historical Archaeology in Latin America 1. University of South Carolina. South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Columbia. South, Stanley, 1972, Evolution and Horizon as Revealed in Ceramic Analysis in Historical Archaeology. The Conference on Historic Site Archaeology Papers 1971. 6 (2): 71-116. South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Columbia. South, Stanley, 1977, Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology. Academic Press, New York. South, Stanley, 1994, Pioneers in Historical Archaeology. Plenum Press, NewYork. South, Stanley, editor, 1994-1996, Historical Archaeology in Latin America 1-16. University of South Carolina. South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Columbia. !"#$%&'()%#*+)*+#,*'--.%-)/+%0-'*1 Preface Buenos Aires is today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a settlement of over eight million inhabitants, a capital city of a republic (Argentina), and one of the largest cities in the Americas, with a pre- vailing white population, an important middle class, and no Aborigines or Afro-Argentines. Hard as it may be to believe, way back in time the village had been far from viable, a situation that persisted for almost two centuries. Thus, it was necessary to be founded twice in the same place and several more times elsewhere. The first half century elapsed under conditions of utmost poverty and hardship, and its existence was more than once at stake until the

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