Women in 16thCentury San Juan, Puerto Rico: Material Culture and Gender Role Contradictions

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper will address women’s role in 16thcentury San Juan, Puerto Rico, through documentary sources produced by the Royal Treasury. Their role made part of the sociocultural transformations that were caused by the intensity of the Spanish conquest in the so called New World. The data consulted illustrates the migration and importation dynamics during the early 16thcentury. As a manner of understanding early colonial development and the imposition of the Spanish system in the Caribbean, topics such as gender and ethnicity will be revised. The main objective of this research was to quantify imported goods, in order to identify women in these product assemblages. The presence or absence of these items in the archaeological record can aid the assessment of women’s role in domestic and urban spaces of the Spanish Caribbean, and how it was challenged and transformed in response to their sociocultural context.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 705