Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2023
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Environmental historians have highlighted the ways in which European colonialisms of the 15th through 18th centuries CE led to large-scale changes in environments and ecologies, from the so-called ‘Columbian-exchange’, to the linked processes of Indigenous genocide and reforestation, to the effects of introduced livestock on pastoral landscapes. In this symposium, we seek to mobilize archaeological scholarship to re-examine colonialisms’ entanglements with more intimate human-environment interactions––networks of relationships between people, animals, plants, soils, waters, and beyond that shape and sustain both human life and political institutions. We analyze the ways in which invaders, colonists, Indigenous people and other agents in distinct colonial contexts negotiated relationships and policies around access to land, water rights, and human labor, against the backdrop of an evolving political ecology of empire and acquisition, and we consider the longer-term (sometimes unanticipated) consequences that resulted from these negotiations.
Other Keywords
Colonialism •
andes •
Agriculture •
Cultural Ecology •
Revitalization •
Landscape •
Food •
Materiality •
rituals •
Legacy
Geographic Keywords
North America •
Andean South America •
Peru / Andes •
Andes Mountains, Peru •
Carribean, Jamaica •
Andes, North America, Philippines
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)
- Documents (6)
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Consuming Contagion: Taki Onqoy and the Ideological Rejection of European Foodstuffs (16th-Century, Ayacucho, Peru) (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Andean groups in the Central Highlands of Peru directly experienced colonialism through evangelization and the periodic presence of Spanish authorities rather than violent combat or direct mandates. Through the entanglement of new European foods and animals (wheat, horse, pig, and cow)...
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An Exploration of the Moral Ecologies of Spanish and English Colonists in North America (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Particularly during the early years of Spanish and English colonies in North America, the relationships colonists created with the environment were focused on subsistence production. Colonists’ practices in these efforts frequently entangled Indigenous people. Despite introducing many...
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Exploring the Matter of Mary in Early Colonial Ecuador: Indigenous Appropriations and Material Substrates (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper foregrounds the agency of indigenous peoples in the equatorial Andes in their interactions with the early evangelizers of Christianity. Looking at both historical and contemporary evidence, I consider the material responses of native people to the “unnatural” worldview that...
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From Food to Fodder: Colonial Settlement and Changing Relationships with Prosopis on Peru's North Coast in the 16th Century CE (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Colonial (re)settlement is a process of rearticulation in which people's relationships with landscapes and political institutions are often drastically reconfigured. These relationships include not just attachments to places and configurations of built environments, but also connections...
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It's Just Business: Crop Commercialization and Impacts on Ritual Consumption in Spanish Colonial Contexts (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The commercial production and control of ritually significant crops such as tobacco and corn had highly variable, and sometimes surprising, impacts on consumption patterns in Indigenous cultures throughout the Spanish colonial empire. This presentation will critically analyze theories...
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Maritime Legacy: Blood and Water, Before and After Columbus Made Camp in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Legacy Project uses modern techniques of geo-archaeology to recreate prehistoric maritime landscapes, combining cultural ecology, history and archaeology to reimagine future stewardship. Reinterpretation of all phases of the area's occupation, looks beyond the scope of traditional...