Colonialism (Other Keyword)
226-250 (620 Records)
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...
God's Empire: Ritual, Repression, and Resistance on the Rio Grande, 1300-1848 (2017)
This interdisciplinary project evaluates the relationship between Spanish and indigenous religious practices and their respective political objectives in proto-historic and colonial New Mexico. Beginning with a discussion of the emergence of a new religious idiom in the Pueblo world during the fourteenth century CE, I investigate the entanglement of political and economic forces with religion up to the conquest of the region by Anglo-Americans in the mid-1840s. In doing so, I highlight the...
Going to Virginia: Chicacoans and the Early Northern Neck (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Early records from Chicacoan, the first permanent English community on Virginia’s Northern Neck, refer to residents “going to Virginia,” in spite of living within that colony’s established boundaries. Settling land that the colonial government had forbidden its citizens to occupy, and openly...
"The Golden Splendor of Montserrat Limes!": A Multi-Scalar Archaeology of Caribbean Citrus Industry (ca. 1852-1928) (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Social Landscapes of Settler Colonialism in the Caribbean", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the citrus lime industry (ca. 1852-1928) on the island of Montserrat. It examines how the new industry, largely catalyzed by the British Quaker Sturge family, provoked changes to the island's post-sugar landscape as well as its inhabitants. Using a...
Governing in the Early Modern Sapmi (2016)
In the 17th century, the Swedish kingdom launched exploitation and colonization programs in the northern region of Sápmi. These programs involved political, economic and cultural rhetoric of reform, progress and utility as well as practical and material actions of rearranging the landscape. Traditionally this process has been viewed as largely designed and controlled by the state with rather passive participation/resistance of the Sami. In this paper I will challenge this picture and discuss the...
The Hacienda and the Formation of Cultural Traditions in Nueva Granada (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The hacienda in Nueva Granada was a space of domination by the Europeans in their colonial expansion in America. In it, a multiplicity of intercultural relationships were woven between indigenous people, enslaved Africans and Spanish. This melting pot of individuals with different cultures and originating from various societies found themselves on the farm...
Hard Choices Along the Rio Grande: Piro Trade Networks and Decision-Making During the 1680 Pueblo Revolt (2015)
The Piro Pueblos along the southern Rio Grande did not join with the rebelling Pueblos in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and instead left New Mexico with the retreating Spanish or migrated to other Pueblos. The events of the Revolt and the circumstances of Spanish colonialism required that the Piro make political decisions such as these. The same was true for the northern Pueblos organizing the Revolt, who decided not to include the Piros as part of the rebellion. For both groups, these decisions were...
Hearth, Home, and Colonialism: Cultural Entanglement at Calluna Hill, a 1630s Pequot War Household (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the nature of cultural change and continuity during the early colonial period (ca. 1615–1637), an understudied period in southern New England. The earliest years of intercultural exchange between Europeans and Native people in the region is believed to have brought sweeping disturbances to Native American lifeways; however,...