Bleeding Heart: The Spanish Colonies and their Legacy

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Hess. Aliya R. Hoff. Dominique Meyer. Dominique Rissolo. Luis Leira Guillermo. Jeffrey Glover. Fabio Esteban Amador. Andrew Vaughn. Falko Kuester.

Located on the remote northeastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula sits the 16th century church at Ecab, thought to be the first church in Mexico, which is in a fragile state of decay and in need of documentation and conservation. The church as well as the curate's house have been abandoned since 1644 and have both survived centuries of hurricanes and erosion.  The site, also referred to as Boca Iglesias, was a remote encomienda in colonial Mexico and still remains isolated today on a coastal rise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine L Brewer.

Personal identity, while always fluid, was especially so in the borderlands that made up seventeenth-century Spanish Florida due to the collision of many different cultures within the colonial system. The Spanish missions set up by the Franciscans who travelled to the frontier of Spanish territory in Florida served as places wherein the Apalachee, the Guale, and the Timucua could negotiate issues of identity such as gender, social status, and age. Analysis of cemetery populations excavated from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ericha Sappington.

By the end of the eighteenth-century, the boundaries of Spain’s La Florida territory were informally defined by a series of outposts ranging west from St. Augustine to Pensacola. These outposts were strategically placed in order to secure supplies and regulate trade while maintaining Spanish-Indian relations in the territorial borderlands. Within these borderlands lay the fortified port of San Marcos de Apalache, initially established in 1677 in order to monitor the shipment of supplies from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robyn P Woodward.

Every empire needs an ideology, and the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church found their sense of justifying mission in the obligations to uphold and extend their faith and by extension a civilized way of life.   Lacking lucrative mineral resources, Jamaica was destined to become the first primarily agricultural colony established by the Spanish during the contact period. Founded in 1509 as the capital of the island, Sevilla la Nueva prospered briefly as a supply base for other Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam R. Sweitz.

The modern era is distinguished by the increasing articulation of people and places within a globalizing world characterized by a capitalist world-economy that links the local and regional to the global within an integrated World-System.  Central to this system is a worldwide division of labor that organizes individuals and households into exploitative relationships within global commodity chains.  The Yucatan Peninsula, a geographically bounded and economically peripheral place, transcends...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Meierhoff. Lorena Paiz.

After nearly millennia of isolation and abandonment, Tikal, the once mighty city of the ancient Classic Maya, was briefly reoccupied by Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901). While small, this village was comprised of a conglomeration of at least three different Maya speaking groups, seeking safety and autonomy in the frontier zone of the dense and sparsely occupied Petén Jungle. This remote region was exploited for centuries by groups escaping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Menaker.

This paper outlines developing dissertation research that integrates archaeological and historical evidence about the community of Andagua and the Ayo Valley in the Southern Peruvian Andes. Constructed as a Spanish colonial reducción, Andagua resides in a seldom-visited highland area, and today is merely considered a rural, provincial neighbor of Arequipa. Andagua, however, has a striking past evident in the substantial prehispanic remains that surround and lie buried beneath the contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Jamieson.

From the 17th century until the land reforms of the last fifty years, hacienda agriculture dominated the highland region surrounding Chimborazo, Ecuador.  Many of the central building complexes of these operations now stand as ruins on the landscape.  Through interviews, historical research, and site survey, I explore the role that these ruins play as silent witnesses to a difficult past for rural indigenous communities today.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan J. M. Weaver.

The Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project, focusing on slavery on colonial Jesuit wine estates of the Peruvian south coast, was initiated to broaden our understandings of the African diaspora in Peru, which historically existed at the edge of the Afro-Atlantic World, and is presently at the periphery of historical and archaeological scholarship. This paper explores the production and use of botijas – so-called Iberian Olive Jars – in the making of wine and brandy at two Jesuit estates and...