Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas

Early colonial encounters with Europeans initiated transformations in indigenous social, cultural, and material worlds. Archaeologists have recently come to investigate the varieties and complexities of indigenous colonial dynamics. Scholars increasingly emphasize indigenous agencies in negotiating colonial encounters and appropriating European material culture through gifts, trade, or imitation. This has resulted in exploring why indigenous people adopted or resisted foreign objects, and how such differential choices not only altered indigenous material assemblages, but also affected existing social, political, and economic structures. Over the past thirty years, our understanding of material encounters in the colonial Americas has advanced largely through studies based on cases from North America, using updated theories on, for example, consumption, hybridity, and entanglement. Building upon these efforts, this session will specifically target the hitherto underrepresented Caribbean and its surrounding mainlands, including northern South America, Central America, and the southeastern United States, shifting the focus to 15th-18th c. Spanish colonialism. Participants will use indigenous long-term historical trajectories to discuss how foreign goods were differentially employed across time, space, and scale; how these were considered within indigenous ontologies and value systems; what implications their adoption had for larger indigenous society; and, which theoretical trends best help us understand indigenous material practices.