The roots of the Columbian Exchange: an entanglement and network approach to early Caribbean encounter transactions

Abstract

The colonization of the Caribbean initiated a process of entanglement of people, goods, and ideas between the “New” and “Old World,” which is popularly referred to as the Columbian Exchange. This paper seeks to highlight the multiscalar and material underpinnings of this process of global importance by tracing it to its roots: the earliest encounters between the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and European colonists. We present a database, based on key Spanish historical sources, which catalogs all references to the transaction of objects between Amerindians and Europeans from AD 1492–1497. We furthermore argue for the need of a framework that is able to connect, explore, and track the structural materiality of things in encounter events. For this we suggest a combination of entanglement theory with network and substantive analyses. This multiscalar theoretical and methodological framework shows how a diverse and contextually specific network of humans and things arose in tandem with European and Amerindian attempts to establish, manipulate, and contest ties of significant personal and historical interest.

Diversity and similarity in the Ceramic Age lapidary production in the Caribbean islands

“…and can also have a score according to their importance in the network on different criteria (number of links with other sites, number of links between two other sites that necessarily pass through it, etc.). This type of analysis is particularly widespread in archaeological studies of archipelagos (Dawson 2021), whether it concerns the islands of the Pacific (e.g., O'Connor, White, and Hunt 2017; Cochrane and Lipo 2010), the Mediterranean (e.g., Freund and Batist 2014;Knappett, Evans, and Rivers 2008), or, more specifically for this work, the Caribbean islands, which have also been the subject of a surprisingly large number of studies of this type (Amati et al 2020;Keehnen and Mol 2020;Mol and Mans 2013). Specifically, my work enters the category material networks defined by Mills (2017), which includes the possibility of representing the links between network nodes (here, the sites) based on the similarity of their archaeological material content.…”

The Elemental Analysis of Glass Beads

“…Worldwide, agents of numerous colonial powers used glass beads to facilitate initial contacts with local Indigenous groups. In the American Southeast and the Caribbean, for example, beads were a common component of early colonial "gift kits" intended to secure friendly relations with various Native peoples (Keehnen and Mol 2020). Centuries later in western North America, Spanish missionaries, Russian merchants, Euro-American trappers, and explorers flying various flags all carried glass beads as commodities that could be presented to tribes throughout California and the Pacific Northwest (Crull 1997;Panich et al, this volume) (Figure 2.2).…”

Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas

“…In addition, objects embodied and directed transformations in social, cultural, and material domains for all of those involved. Especially in the Caribbean -the nexus of first interactions between groups from Europe, Africa, and the Americas -it is most interesting to unravel the entanglement of widely divergent material culture repertoires (Hofman 2019;Hofman et al 2012;Keehnen and Mol 2018). Here, with no previous contact, indigenous communities and Spanish/European explorers and colonists used objects to negotiate a mutual base of understanding.…”