Transforming material collectives: the subaltern vs the global

Summary

In this paper the relation between transforming material collectives and subalternity is investigated. When a people or group incorporate new materials hereby slowly transforming its own material collective into the similar new ‘dominating’ material collective, does that imply that the ‘subaltern’ loses its archaeological identity? Does it mean the dominating new collective always represents ‘hegemony’? Not necessarily. In this paper, cases from the circum-Caribbean are discussed concerning their indigenous historical and contemporary archaeologies. Since the new boundary context came into existence in 1492, the once separate Indigenous and European material collectives started to blur. Indigenous material assemblages transformed through the influence of the European colonizer. Vice versa, the early European colonizers transformed their collectives with indigenous elements. The original material collectives no longer exclusively represent either the indigenous or the European colonizer, but both have transformed each other’s local collectives. The transformation effect of this on the Indigenous-Caribbean collectives is discussed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage