Colonialism (Other Keyword)
201-225 (548 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the results of pollen, phytolith, starch, and organic residue (FTIR) analyses conducted on soapstone cooking vessels in museum collections uncovered in the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas, California. The vessels were excavated from distinct chronological and spatial contexts in the Chumash homeland: a pre-Mission period site...
Forced Labor versus “Slavery”: European Ideas and Indigenous Realities in Mesoamerica (CE 600–1521) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation reconsiders what has conventionally been described as Mesoamerican “slavery.” Slavery is but one form of forced labor within various informal and institutionalized practices. Thus far, the majority of Mesoamerican forced labor...
The Forest through the Trees: Using Vivifacts to Analyze How Native American Landscapes Shaped Colonial Encounter (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1836, after centuries of occupation, Native Americans signed over 13 million acres of Northern Michigan land to the U.S. in an attempt to curtail complete removal from their ancestral homeland. This research project examines the transitional period of land loss in the mid-19th century to analyze to what extent Native Americans utilized the landscape before,...
Forts on Burial Mounds: Strategies of Colonization in the Dakota Homeland (2016)
For hundreds of years, Upper Midwest Dakota constructed burial earthworks at natural liminal spaces. These sacred landscapes signaled boundaries between sky, earth, and water realms; the living and the dead; and local bands. During the 19th century, the U.S. Government took ownership of Dakota homelands in Minnesota and the Dakotas leading to decades of violent conflict. At the boundaries of conflict forts were built to help the military "sweep the region now occupied by hostiles" and protect...
Forts, Firebases and Art: ways of seeing the conflict landscape of Africa’s last colony – Western Sahara (2013)
Spain colonised Western Sahara in 1884. Any Spanish sense of place in the territory was limited until the French ‘pacified’ the region in 1934, and the colony was girdled by French and Spanish forts. Spain ceded the colony to Morocco and Mauritania in 1975, and Spain’s disarticulated outposts were replaced by a matrix of earth and stone defensive walls (berms), constructed by the new colonizing power, Morocco, in its bid to secure the territory from nationalist Polisario fighters. Viewing these...
From Accommodation to Massacre: Evolving Native Responses to Spanish Military Expeditions in the Interior Southeast, 1540-1568 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 1540 and 1568, three Spanish military expeditions penetrated the interior region of the southeastern United States, interacting on two or more occasions with several Native chiefdoms extending between Alabama and the Carolinas. The army of Hernando de Soto crossed this entire area in 1540, followed by revisits to the western...
From Cacao to Sugar: Long-Term Maya Economic Entanglement in Colonial Guatemala (2016)
This paper explores highland Maya sugar production as a product of later colonial entanglement influenced by precolonial and early colonial innovations and traditions. In the mid-17th century, the colonial Kaqchikel Maya community of San Pedro Aguacatepeque is described as a producer of sugar. Hoewever, the community’s embrace of sugar cane production (and associated sugar products) emerged in a complicated manner: as a product of preexisting precolonial and early colonial cacao tribute...
From Colonialism to Imperialism: Political Economy and Beyond (2016)
This paper explores some of the theoretical and evidentiary challenges facing the comparative study of colonialism and its imperial dimensions through the lens of political economy. It focuses on the advantages and limitations of political economy as a framework for understanding the transformation of colonies into post-colonial societies. Drawing on case material from North America, the Caribbean and India –three areas with vastly different colonial histories - this paper asks whether political...
From Colony to Empire: Fifty Years of Conceptualizing the Relationship between Britain and its New World Colonies through Archaeology (2017)
Through a series of brief case studies drawn from archaeological research in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Williamsburg, Virginia, St. George's, Bermuda, and Bridgetown, Barbados, this paper examines how American historical archaeology has developed its understanding of Britain's establishment of its colonies throughout the New World. It is argued that the gradual but significant shift in geographic scale from regional specialization to frameworks like the Atlantic World,...
From Contact to Colony at the Edge of the Tiguex Province (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first accounts of the Rio Grande Valley were made by outsiders on the Vázquez de Coronado expedition in 1540. Their descriptions regularly focused on the river valley and its associated settlements even though other surrounding areas were well settled at that time. By exploring texts written during the earliest...
From Food to Fodder: Colonial Settlement and Changing Relationships with Prosopis on Peru's North Coast in the 16th Century CE (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Colonial (re)settlement is a process of rearticulation in which people's relationships with landscapes and political institutions are often drastically reconfigured. These relationships include not just attachments to places and configurations of built environments, but also connections...
From Island to the City: A Preliminary Archaeological Investigation of Krio and Aku Settlements at Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Contact and Colonialism" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In May-June 2018, I conducted a preliminary archaeological investigation on Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone. The goal of this investigation is/was to identify, map and record the archaeological remains of the early colonial period of coastal Sierra Leone, focusing on the Krio and Aku settlements. The Krio and Aku people are descendants...
From Shell To Glass: How Beads Reflect A Changing Indigenous Cultural Landscape (2018)
This paper explores how indigenous groups in the lower Potomac River valley used beads of shell, glass, copper, stone, and clay to both respond to and shape an ever-changing colonial landscape. The distributions of beads recovered from five sites occupied between 1500 and 1710 reveal variations and trends linked to site function, status, ethnicity, displacement, and dislocation. In particular, the distribution of bead color, an important attribute for communicating Native states of being,...
The Future of Archaeological Research on Public Lands: A Case Study from California (2018)
Lynne Goldstein has been on the front lines in developing innovative field programs for the study of diverse places in North America.This paper examines her influence on archaeological investigations undertaken at the Russian colony of Ross in northern California. A significant trend in the study of sites on public lands is the shift from broad-scale, high-impact excavations to low-impact field practices. The paper outlines her legacy in the development of coordinated research programs that...
Game Theory, Chaos Theory, and the Archaeology of Indigenous Responses to Global Spanish Colonialisms (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dominant historical narratives have favored interpretations that conquered groups yielded to the political and economic might of colonizing powers. Recent models in archaeology, however, emphasize that indigenous responses to colonialism are more complex than succumbing or capitulating to colonial and imperial hegemony, and that indigenous peoples...
The Genetic Prehistory of the Andean Highlands 7,000 Years BP though European Contact (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The peopling of the Andean highlands above 2500m in elevation was a complex process that included cultural, biological and genetic adaptations. Here we present a time series of ancient whole genomes from the Andes of Peru, dating back to 7,000 calendar years before present (BP), and compare them to 64 new genome-wide genetic variation datasets from...
Geology and Governance: Colonial Andean Mercury Mining and the Marroquín Collapse of 1786 (2018)
The study of an event may seem in opposition to the investigation of deep time, yet it is difficult to analyze one temporal scale without invoking the other. This paper examines this paradoxical linkage of events and the longue durée through the case study of a catastrophic event in the Spanish colonial mercury mines of Huancavelica in the Central Andean Highlands. The Marroquín collapse of 1786 claimed hundreds of indigenous lives, and symbolized the late 18th century decline of Spanish...
Geophysical Methods at the Hollister Site: Summary of Finds (2018)
Geophysical methods in archaeology are increasingly integrated into traditional archaeological surveys. Remote sensing is valuable because it allows for large areas to be surveyed relatively quickly and noninvasively. At the Hollister site in South Glastonbury, Connecticut, magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar, were implemented over a 140x140 meter area. Magnetometry measures alterations to earth’s magnetic field. This method is helpful for identifying a number of artifacts and features,...
Getting to Know Your Neighbours: Critically Thinking Through an 19th Cenutry Irish Family in Ontario (2018)
In exploring ethnicities in North America, groups are often contrasted against a homogenized patterning that can often be read as the white Euro-Canadian colonizer. While this framing is effective for demonstrating while specific groups may differ from the predominant pattern, it also risks creating a ‘straw-dog’ argument that artificially creates a homogenized pattern where non exist. This paper shows that the white Euro-Canadian colonizer can be explored to demonstrate nuanced ethnic...
Gift of the Gods: A Mashup of the History of Mesoamerican Avocados (2023)
This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The earliest avocados of the Americas were dispersed by extinct megafauna, and later by human populations, including Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs peoples. Prized for their flavor and rich caloric content, avocados were portrayed on Maya king’s tombs, served as the municipal symbol of ancient Mesoamerican cities, as a month in the Maya...
A GIS of Movement and Sensory Experience at a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru (2016)
GIS in archaeology has diversified beyond its origins as a map-and-database and predictive modeling tool to explore multidimensional views of human experience in the past. This paper combines models of movement and visibility at the scale of a single settlement to render an approximation of sensory experience within the built environment of a planned colonial town in highland Peru. In the 1570s, some 1.5 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled to “reduction towns” (reducciones) based on a...
Glass Bead Image File Join Table (2015)
This is a two-column spreadsheet listing the name of each *.jpg of all glass beads and pendants examined in the study. They are listed along with the sample ID of each artifact. The images themselves will be uploaded into a separate *.pdf. The complete Filemaker Pro 13 glass bead database, which includes artifact provenience information, images, and compositional analysis results obtained with LA-ICP-MS is available from the author upon request. This is a *.fmp12 file type, which is not...
Global Capitalism Is Modern Colonialism (2013)
Colonialism has long been a focus of research within the field of Historical Archaeology. Recently, archaeological understanding of colonialism has become more complex and realistic as researchers have included issues centering on consumerism, the articulations of colonialist processes with capitalism, and colonialism’s role in globalization processes. However, much Historical Archaeological scholarship has implicitly or explicitly recognized colonialism as an arterial process within the larger...
Globalizing Lifeways: An Analysis of Local and Imported Ceramics at an Aku Site in Banjul, The Gambia. (2016)
Following the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade, the West African coast saw the rise of a new phenomenon: the liberation of captive Africans found aboard illegal slaving ships and their resettlement in Sierra Leone and The Gambia. This diaspora group became known as the Liberated Africans, and eventually transformed into the creole ethnic group known as the Aku in The Gambia. After its establishment in 1816 Bathurst (now Bathurst) welcomed the Liberated Africans as a source of low-paid...
Go-Betweens, Transculturation, and the Notion of the Frontier in the Potomac River Valley (2017)
Go-betweens, including translators, traders, diplomats, and other individuals who move between two or more cultures, are often viewed as important and even transforming actors in the colonial encounter. Go-betweens in the early modern Chesapeake are understood as not only moving between two or more cultures but between cultures located at some geographical distance from one another’s territories (in Maryland, Henry Fleet and William Claiborne would be examples). But what about the nature of...