Colonialism (Other Keyword)
51-75 (620 Records)
The annexation of Gaul into the Roman Empire in the mid-first century BCE spurred the development of new religious practices in that region, including the practice of offering votive figurines at sanctuaries. Because each votive represents a personal decision on the part of the dedicant, analysis of votive assemblages provides unique insight into the demographics of worshippers and illuminates aspects of individual identity in this colonial context. Here, I present the results of a quantitative...
Belonging and Exclusion in Early Colonial Huamanga (Ayacucho), Peru: An Isotopic, Religious and Archival View (2018)
Built in AD 1605, La Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesus de Huamanga is the earliest Jesuit church in modern-day Ayacucho, Peru. Archaeological excavations underneath the church floor uncovered human and faunal remains dating to the 17th and 18th centuries CE. Only indigenous individuals appear to be buried underneath the church floors. Despite significant forced labor practices (mita) at the time, few individuals buried in the church show signs of bodily stress or disease prevalent in those engaged...
Belongings as Archives: An Abundant Approach to Sugpiaq Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The historian Tiya Miles argues for an abundant approach to history, in which researchers learn to excavate absences in the historical record instead of allowing those silences to stand. Belongings (a.k.a. artifacts or objects) are additional archives that contain the stories, energies, and contexts in which they were made and used. As part of my work with...
Bermuda’s First Capital: Archaeology of Moore’s Town (1612) and English Atlantic Expansion (2025)
Bermuda’s settlement occurred at the dawn of 17th century English colonization of the Atlantic world. This paper elaborates on findings at Smallpox Bay on Smith's Island from excavation between 2013 and 2024 focused on Moore’s Town, Bermuda’s first but short- lived 1612 capital. Material uncovered at this site situates Bermuda’s inception at the intersection of colonial, architectural, and trans-Atlantic histories. Analysis of recently recovered architectural features and building material sheds...
Between consumption and extermination: archaeologies of modern imperialism (2013)
In this introduction to the session, an outline of the existing and possible archaeologies of imperialism will be sketched. Emphasis will be put on the potential of archaeology to construct alternative narratives on Western colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It will be argued that this kind of archaeology has to take into account violence (both physical and symbolic), but also forms of hybridization, war as well as trade and exchange, open and subtle resistance, and hegemonic...
Beyond Romanization and Colonialism: Roman Influences in Ireland (2016)
Currently, models of colonial theory are being broken down with better understandings of fluid frontiers and more complex systems of culture contact. These new frameworks offer greater insights into how groups interact and provide us with a substantial platform on which to discuss nuanced exchange networks. With recent renewed interest in exchange during the Late Iron Age in the British Isles, there has been greater advanced scholarship in our understanding of interactions between Rome and...
Beyond the Holes of Archaeology: Paying Attention to Indigenous Academics, Artists, and Activists (2018)
Archaeology continues to need the infusion of indigenous perspectives, not only to take responsibility for the discipline’s past in colonial contexts, but also to advance its ability to understand human histories – especially indigenous ones – in respectful, innovative, and inclusive ways. This need is particularly strong for those archaeologists who study Native American cultural and community life just before, right into, and well after the onset of European colonialism and for those who are...
Big Data and the Berry Site: Colonial Archaeology in the Carolina Foothills (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From December 1566 to March 1568, Captain Juan Pardo established a network of six small garrisons extending beyond the Atlantic Coast through modern-day North and South Carolina and across the Appalachian Mountains into eastern Tennessee. The first of these, Fort San Juan, was built in the Appalachian Foothills at a...
The Bioarchaeology of Colonization and Missionization at San Bernabé, Lake Petén Itzá (2016)
The Spanish established the San Bernabé Mission in the heartland of the Itzá Maya area at Tayasal in the Petén Lakes region around 1710. Census data suggest that the mission was at the center of a multi-cultural community of 126 individuals in 1712, yet within three decades the population size had reduced by 70% potentially due to epidemics and flight. Excavations by the Tayasal Archaeological Project have recovered 46 individuals from 33 graves in the mission’s cemetery that shed light on what...
Bioarchaeology of Mission San Antonio de Valero: Preliminary Results and Methodological Insights from the Alamo Church and Long Barrack Restoration Project (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Mission San Antonio de Valero and the Alamo – A Construction History from Mission to Military Fortress, Texas, United States", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the 2019–2020 archaeological investigations at the Mission San Antonio de Valero, 12 historic burial features were recovered from the interior of the Alamo Church. The 12 exhumed burials represented a minimum number of 14 individuals, comprising...
Blue Tunics and Royal Lions: Colonial Period Changes in Clothing and Changing Conceptions of Indigeneity in the Spanish Colonial Americas (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. This paper addresses the impact of conquest and colonialism on indigenous Andean peoples’ clothing styles and textile motifs in the central Andes, using examples from elsewhere in Latin America and beyond to contextualize documented patterns. Comparing Prehispanic and colonial period examples, I use several classes of material culture...
Bodies of Technology: Dress in Colonial Peru (2015)
The textiles of Magdalena de Cao Viejo provide an opportunity to study technological changes in one coastal Andean settlement between the late 16th and the early 18th century. As a colonial reducción, Magdalena was home to people of both Andean and Spanish descent. Among the more than 3,000 textile artifacts are examples of cloth woven with pre-Columbian methods and indigenous fibers, fabrics created on European-style floor looms, and examples which combine Andean and European techniques and...
Booms, Busts, and Changing (Anti)Market Engagement in Pacific piedmont Guatemala (2015)
Located in the cacao-rich Pacific piedmont region of Guatemala, the colonial period Kaqchikel Maya community of San Pedro Aguacatepeque produced cacao for the Iximche Kaqchikel polity prior to colonization. With the 16th century global cacao boom that followed Spanish colonization, cacao producing communities in the region became critical sources of this increasingly desired regional and global exchange good. The bust of the global cacao market in the latter part of the century, coupled with...
Borderlands, Continuances and Violence: A Social Nexus at Black Star Canyon, San Juan Capistrano California (2015)
Post European contact the historicity of the Santa Ana Mountain landscape of Orange County, California has been popularly constructed around the narratives of bucolic mission and ranch life, and that of the "wild frontier". The interplay between both histories has contributed to a memorialization of the Santa Ana Mountains as a borderland space during the Spanish, Mexican and American colonial eras that deemphasizes indigenous social life. This paper seeks to complicate the historical concept of...
Bridging the Divide: A Study of Fourteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Native Settlements in the Middle Chesapeake (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists (including the author) investigating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Native sites in the Chesapeake point out how materially different these assemblages are from those recovered from contemporary colonial sites. Characterized by materials almost wholly produced by Native hands with some...
Bridging the Gap: Exploring Historical Human-Environment Dynamics within a Biodiversity Hotspot in the Gulf of Guinea (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Islands around Africa: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To help protect the Earth’s diverse species from disappearing at an alarming rate, research is needed in important biodiversity hotspots to understand how humans have interacted with their environment throughout history and how these insights can contribute to their future sustainability. Archaeology and paleoecology are...
Bridging the Gaps: Integrating Archaeology and History in Oaxaca, Mexico (2015)
Bridging the Gaps: Integrating Archaeology and History in Oaxaca, Mexico does just that: it bridges the gap between archaeology and history of the Precolumbian, Colonial, and Republican eras of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, a cultural area encompassing several of the longest-enduring literate societies in the world. Fourteen case studies from an interdisciplinary group of archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and art historians consciously compare and contrast changes and...
Building a College in Colonial America: evidence from Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA. (2018)
Recent excavations in the Harvard Yard have expanded our understanding of investment and institutionalization of education in the 17th century. Archaeology of Harvard's first building demonstrates the richness of material culture used at the dining table and the investment made to construct a significant structure on the landscape. We provide a preliminary analysis of artifact density and distribution of dining and architectural objects of the most recent excavation season, laying the groundwork...
Building an Empire: Spanish Colonial Encounters with Maya Houses and Housebuilding (2018)
In the late sixteenth century, King Philip II of Spain sent out a request to the local administrators of his overseas colonies, asking that they complete a questionnaire designed to collect information about the lands he had conquered. The responses to this questionnaire, completed primarily between 1578-1586, form a set of documents now known as the Relaciones Geográficas. Question 31 asked respondents to describe the form and construction of the local houses and the materials used to build...
Building Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Colonial Tanzania and its Urban Representation (2013)
Tanzania’s coastal harbour towns underwent phenomenally rapid transformation from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. This was the result of British and German colonialism and the development of a new capitalist system of economic and social control. This new western design served to re-define the earlier systems of capitalist exchange within the formally Omani dominated Swahili Coast. The various systems of appropriation and reorganisation are represented in the urban landscape and resulted in...
The Burial Ground at Otstonwakin: Native American Mortuary Practices in 18th Century Pennsylvania (2018)
The multinational village of Otstonwakin was a key nexus of colonial and indigenous interaction where colonial identities were expressed as well as constituted through material remains. The sacred landscape that was used by the residents of Otstonwakin to bury their dead was disturbed by road construction projects in both the late 1800s and early 1900s. While the full extent of the cemetery associated with Otstonwakin is unknown, the burial ground is represented by four documented graves and a...
Burial Plots: Finding Theatre in the Thanatology of Colonial North Coast Peru. (2018)
Spain's invasion of the Andes initiated a social drama unprecedented in the experience of the Andean natives. Spanish and Spanish-conscripted native chroniclers wrote extensively about Inca pageantry, spectacle, and ritual, and hastily attributed pagan belief to performances they witnessed or heard about. With equal haste, the Spanish appropriated performance as means of introducing and enforcing Christianity. In this paper, I treat performance as the central feature of Andean Colonial...
Buying Into It: A Study of Economic Engagement on the Eastern Pequot Reservation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This multi-scalar project examines economic patterns and foodways related to Native American ceramic use on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. Engagement with local Euro-American markets by the Eastern Pequot was necessary during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Analysis of ceramic assemblages focusing on ware type, vessel...
Canaries in the Coal Mine: How Children Reveal the Embodied Realities of Colonialism (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Childhood is paradoxically the most precarious yet vital period of a person’s life. It is when children form their biological and social self, embodying everything around them. However, what surrounds them may not be safe, stable, or congruent with a healthy, long life....
Caribbean Colonialism and Space Archaeology (2017)
The analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery to aid archaeological understanding, or "Space Archaeology" as it is sometimes called, presents a largely untapped set of methodologies for historical archaeological work. This project makes use of Normalized Differential Vegetation Indexes (NDVI) calculated on high-resolution satellite images of the British Virgin Islands. These data are combined with historic maps to analyze the different productive potentials of different plantations and...