Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although the concept of entanglement has found favor in analyses of colonial activities across the early Americas, recent work by archaeologists and ethnohistorians has begun to offer productive, alternative approaches (e.g., Semerari 2016). Rather than seeing entanglement as an inevitable feature of the colonial project, this session presents a rich vein of case studies highlighting colonial actors - both individuals and communities - who employed strategies of active disengagement from European colonial powers seeking to impose dominion and dominance over their lives. Examples range from Pueblo, Mississippian, and Plains communities in North America, to Cimarrones in the Caribbean, African conquistadors/maroon communities in Ecuador, and Mapuche groups in Chile. These papers emphasize the broad range of communities engaged in strategies of disentanglement and the wide behavioral spectrum in which these strategies played out. Equally, each presentation traces a long regional trajectory highlighting the deep chronological persistence of these contests - designed to impose colonial order and dominance, or subvert them. These contributions also emphasize that disentanglement is ongoing - continuing into the present day - and the value of employing approaches that emphasize complex, enduring negotiations over notions of inevitable, hegemonic, and perpetual colonial authority.

Other Keywords
Ethnohistory/History • Colonialism • contact period • Historical Archaeology • Slavery • Historic • digital archaeology • conflict • Formative • Mixtec

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • Belize (Country) • Republic of Panama (Country) • Netherlands Antilles (Country) • Aruba (Country) • USA (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • Department of Martinique (Country) • Republic of El Salvador (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Anti-Colonialism, State Development, and Araucanian Resilience in the South-Central Andes (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Dillehay.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation centers on indigenous proto-state or polity formation in the early Spanish period in the south-central Andes and the sociocultural conditions that shaped a specific type of archaeological record, an unostentatious material culture for a polity-level of society. The historical focus is on the...

  • Chicasa and Soto: Toward a Continuum of Disentanglement (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Robbie Ethridge. Charles Cobb.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of "entanglement," when applied to the Native American colonial experience, usually assumes both an inevitability and magnitude that comes with historical hindsight. Such an assumption easily masks the fact that historical players did not act with this in mind and that encounters between Natives and...

  • The Colonial Peten: An Ethnohistory of Indigenous Sovereignty and a Failed Spanish Colonial Project (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alyce De Carteret.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialism—to speak generally—can be characterized as endeavors that aim not just to entangle, but to wholly incorporate, disparate regions under the control of a foreign body. Indigenous disentanglement from these exploitative projects has taken many forms—daily negotiations, subtle refusals, outright rebellions....

  • Early Native and African marooning in Northern South America the circum-Caribbean (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Beatty-Medina.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the dual development of African and Native American maroon societies in early Spanish America. Although marronage was widely practiced by Native Americans and Africans, maroon history has been largely defined by African agents. In the early colonial period Africans and Native Americans robustly...

  • The Indigenous Colonization of New France (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Allan Greer.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the French were settling their colony of Canada in the 17th century, Iroquois, Wendat, Abenaki and other indigenous people also established villages in their midst along the St Lawrence River. Historians have considered these native enclaves very much from a European perspective, as markers of the success or...

  • The Material Culture of Maroon Communities in the Early Circum-Caribbean (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Landers.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines early maroon settlements of the Circum-Caribbean and is based upon original research in a wide assortment of Spanish archives, as well as archaeological investigations of African sites in the Americas. As in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, in Spanish Florida, I find Africans readily adapted...

  • Persistent, Multiscalar Disentanglement: Native-Spanish Trajectories in Early Historic New Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Clay Mathers.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What began in 1540 with sustained, lethal confrontations between Southern Tiwa pueblo communities and the conquista campaign of Vázquez de Coronado, set in motion a history of relations in New Mexico regularly punctuated by acts of Native independence and disengagement, and by Spanish policies and countermeasures...

  • Untangling Shifting Social Agendas at Colonial Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I draw on both archaeological and documentary evidence from the site of San Miguel Achiutla, in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico, to examine the complex relationships that residents of this indigenous community had with colonial Spanish rule. At certain points, members of the community harassed...

  • Visualizing Diaspora: Fort Ancient and Shawnee Migrations in Early America (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Warren.

    This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Soon after the De Soto Expedition (1539-1542), Fort Ancient peoples from the Middle Ohio Valley abandoned their summer villages. For twenty generations, village life in this region had been both egalitarian and stable. Through a close reading of archaeological sources, including laser ablation testing of late Fort...