Late Empires: the archaeology of recent colonialism and imperialism - 1860s to the present

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto P. Marti.

During the Cuban War for Independence, blockhouses and defensive lines (the so-called trochas) were constructed in order to divide the island into separate sectors that could be gradually 'disinfected' of insurgents. The non-combatant population was removed from rural areas and resettled in a number of fortified towns where they would be 'protected' by Spanish troops. This counter-insurgency tactic led to the indiscriminate confinement of hundred thousands of civilians and is usually referred as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alfredo González-Ruibal.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Rhodes.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rui Gomes Coelho.

After the formal independence of the Portuguese African colonies between 1974 and 1975, massive numbers of Europeans and settlers of European descent moved to Portugal in one of the most rapid migrations of the century.  This traumatic experience and the problems of redefining a national identity led to the continuous reproduction of an imperial imagination in the old metropolis, but this time without colonies. In this paper I will discuss how old and new urban spaces such as small shops, cafés...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott MacEachern.

The extension of European rule into the southern Lake Chad Basin was one phase in a process of impingement into the area of globalising systems of power and connection that began centuries earlier. It contributed to the disruption of indigenous systems of regional domination, but took place sporadically, especially in the rugged and densely populated terrain of the Mandara Mountains. One significant episode in that process was the First World War siege of a German military unit along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Salvatore Garfi.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Godbout.

The relation between Caribbean plantation economies and the modern ideology, particularly as regard the dominant narrative about the so-called Industrial Revolution, presents a conundrum to scholars of the British Empire.  Plantation economies are often depicted as simultaneously hyper-modernity and anachronistically backwards: their reliance on slave labour is coupled with a highly specialized and systematized tasks; the minimal mechanization of their labour through the 1860s nevertheless...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Cañete.

In current research on the history of archaeological and anthropological representations it is still common to impose a neat boundary between studies of colonial and metropolitan areas. However, this separation is contradictory, with frequent cultural analogies and methodological transferences established between these two areas during the nineteenth century. In this paper it will be argued that there was a common ideological foundation that has determined the direction of research in both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynda A Carroll.

After World War I, the cultural and physical landscapes of the Southern Levant were transformed, as the region transitioned from Ottoman province to the British Mandates of Palestine and Transjordan. In Transjordan, the relationships between colonial policy, state building, and settlement patterns are reflected in the nascent field of Mandate Period Archaeology, and focus on the wide range of colonial experiences of bedu – from entanglement in global capitalism, to the Great Arab Revolt. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Weiss.

This paper explores the legacy of late colonial mineral extraction in South Africa through its architectural and archaeological remains. Key sites of the late 19th century diamond fields, particularly the labor compounds, do not figure into portrayals of the history of the diamond rush at the De Beers corporate diamond museum.   The aim of this paper is to examine how material sites and archaeological remains can tell the story of the tightly interlocked corporate-colonial project in Southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only François G. Richard.

This paper uses the results of long-term archaeological survey and oral histories to examine the intersection of rural migrations, colonial rule, and economic impoverishment in the Siin region of Senegal during the 20th century. The Siin is today the theater of acute rural anxiety, a ‘peasant malaise’ carved by the combined effects of ecological crises, declining land productivity, degrading life conditions, and state withdrawal over the past forty years. These worrisome circumstances, however,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin S.L. Gibson.

Road building has always been essential to the process of colonisation. In Cyprus, British Colonial road building was part of a larger project to secure and civilise the island and its population, making it a model for how other countries should be administered in the Near East. The construction of roads between 1880 and 1900 focussed on establishing security and bringing order to the landscape and its people. In this presentation I focus on the multifaceted dimensions of the construction, use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Britt A. Baillie-Warren.

The battle for land(scape) and territorial control is a key element in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the 'struggle for Jerusalem'. This paper focuses on the impact of the ‘Wall’ on the archaeologically rich and environmentally sensitive Refaim Valley—'the bread basket of Jerusalem'. Here environmental and heritage discourses are being used to legitimize the transformation of the valley from a Palestinian agricultural resource to an Israeli ‘Biblical landscape’ conservation area. This...