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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2021

Noa Corcoran-Tadd*
Affiliation:
Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Jorge Ulloa Hung
Affiliation:
Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC), Santo Domingo; Museo del Hombre Dominicano, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Andrzej T. Antczak
Affiliation:
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, 2333CC Leiden; Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 2311BE Leiden, The Netherlands
Eduardo Herrera Malatesta
Affiliation:
Lorentz Center, Leiden University, 2333CA Leiden, The Netherlands
Corinne L. Hofman
Affiliation:
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, 2333CC Leiden; Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 2311BE Leiden, The Netherlands
*
(noac@princeton.edu, corresponding author)

Abstract

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.

Durante el período colonial temprano las Américas fueron el centro de nuevas escalas de conectividad y proyectos extractivos sin precedentes. Sin embargo, tales transformaciones también se basaron en gran medida en los paisajes, tecnologías e instituciones indígenas preexistentes. Al integrar discusiones recientes en la arqueología y la geografía sobre la movilidad y la materialidad de los recursos, este artículo propone la ruta colonial temprana como un tema clave de investigación y contribuye a nuevos marcos interpretativos emergentes con los cuales entender al colonialismo español como un proceso variable, de gran escala, y materialmente constituido. A través de tres estudios de caso – la ruta de Colón en la isla de La Española, las rutas que conectaban las islas del sudeste del Caribe con América del Sur y la ruta de la plata en los Andes centro-sur – desarrollamos un análisis arqueológico comparativo que revela trayectorias divergentes en la persistencia, apropiación, y eliminación de las rutas y los regímenes de extracción y movilidad en la región durante los siglos quince y dieciséis.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Archaeology

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