The Stark Farm Enigma:

The Remains of the Fray: Nascent Colonialism and Heterogeneous Hybridity

“…Their occurrence at other sixteenth-century Southeast sites (e.g., Blanton 2013:22–23; DePratter and Smith 1980:74–76) suggests that they may have been made specifically for gifting and trade with Native Americans. In particular, the consistent size of examples from some of these sites is suggestive of mass production by Spanish blacksmiths (Legg et al 2020:53). It is interesting that the examples from Stark Farms are generally smaller than those reported in contemporary sites to the east.…”

“…Fourth, it is widely believed that most European metal artifacts occurring at Indigenous sixteenth-century sites in the Americas were deposited as relatively intact goods that were only rarely subjected to any significant modification (Berman and Gnivecki 2019:33; Cipolla 2017:18; Mathers 2019). In contrast, many of the Stark Farms artifacts display evidence for light to heavy reworking in the hands of Native Americans (Legg et al 2019, 2020, as summarized below).…”

“…We note that we first published a descriptive analysis of a portion of the metal artifact assemblage (Legg et al 2019) in a comparative study with the contemporary Glass site (Georgia) to demonstrate that mechanisms in addition to gifting may have been an important factor in the occurrence of metal objects on sixteenth-century Indigenous sites. In a more recent study (Legg et al 2020), we provided a more thorough descriptive analysis of the assemblage and its context to make the argument that it was probably linked to the Hernando do Soto entrada. In this article, we provide our first theoretical and methodological assessment of the hybrid dimensions of the metal tools, alongside our argument for the necessity of situating the spatiotemporal context of hybrid practices.…”