The Archaeological Study of Spanish Colonialism in the Americas

Abstract

Spanish colonial archaeology has undergone a fundamental shift since the Columbian Quincentenary due to the adoption of a bottom-up understanding of colonialism that emphasizes the analysis of local phenomena in a global context and the active ways in which people negotiated the processes set in motion by the conquest. This review examines five key research foci: culture change and identity, missionization, bioarchaeology, economics, and investigations of the colonial core. It ends with a consideration of ongoing challenges posed by the archaeology of colonialism, particularly the relationship of the individual to broader social processes and the emerging role of comparison.

Expanding mission archaeology: A landscape approach to indigenous autonomy in colonial California

“…We also note that colonial settlements need not be missions at all to be included in an examination of native autonomy under missionization. Secular and military interests offered a distinct alternative to life under the bell, and laboring (as opposed to converting) thus can be examined as yet another angle for understanding native autonomy (Van Buren, 2010). For this reason, we combine the original categories of colonial settlements and proximal zones, as proposed by , to include a broader array of native involvement in colonial institutions.…”

The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Araucanian Resilience

“…A letter written to a far-off European king or queen says that all the land belongs to them does not mean anything on the ground. Second, scholarship in recent years has looked more at the nature of contact, finding it be far more nuanced and controlled by native groups than acknowledged in histories, laws, and archaeological explanations (Hauser and Armstrong 2012;Moraña and Jáuregui 2008;Van Buren 2010). From our vantage point 500 years later it is easy to say that colonization was "inevitable," and such simplistic declarations elide the reality that events could have turned out in very different ways for all people involved.…”

Explaining the Past in 2010

“…Adding to a growing body of work on Spanish colonialism in the Americas (reviewed Van Buren 2010) are remarkable new finds from earliest Spanish Peru: bullet wounds in Inca bodies interred outside Lima (Murphy et al 2010) and beautifully preserved fragments of paper at an early colonial coastal town, including a Spaniard's jotted notes on a hitherto‐unknown indigenous language (Quilter et al 2010). More commonly, historical archaeology's bottom‐up approach uniquely enlightens daily experience outside written records.…”