The early colonial period witnessed new scales of connectivity and unprecedented projects of resource extraction across the Spanish Americas. Yet such transformations also drew heavily on preexisting Indigenous landscapes, technologies, and institutions. Drawing together recent discussions in archaeology and geography about mobility and resource materialities, this article takes the early colonial route as a central object of investigation and contributes to new emerging interpretive frameworks that make sense of Spanish colonialism in the Americas as a variable, large-scale, and materially constituted process. Using three case studies—the ruta de Colón on the island of Hispaniola, the routes connecting the southeastern Caribbean islands with mainland South America, and the ruta de la plata in the south-central Andes—we develop a comparative archaeological analysis that reveals divergent trajectories of persistence, appropriation, and erasure in the region's routes and regimes of extraction and mobility during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

中文翻译：

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早期西班牙殖民世界的土著路线和资源重要性：比较考古学方法

早期的殖民时期见证了西班牙美洲新规模的连通性和前所未有的资源开采项目。然而，这种转变也很大程度上依赖于先前存在的土著景观、技术和机构。本文汇集了考古学和地理学中关于流动性和资源重要性的最新讨论，将早期殖民路线作为研究的中心对象，并为新出现的解释框架做出了贡献，这些框架将美洲的西班牙殖民主义理解为一个可变的、大规模的，以及物质构成的过程。使用三个案例研究——科隆芸香在伊斯帕尼奥拉岛上，连接加勒比东南部岛屿和南美洲大陆的航线，以及鲁塔德拉普拉塔在安第斯山脉中南部——我们开展了一项比较考古分析，揭示了 15 世纪和 16 世纪该地区开采和流动的路线和制度中存在的持续、占用和擦除的不同轨迹。