Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas

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.