Archaeologically Assembling The Full Picture of the Political-Economy of Late 18th Century Colonial Trade Relations on the Margins of Empire from the Bisc-2 Shipwreck Site.

Summary

This paper will provide provisional conclusions drawn from the analysis of all our data within a particular methodological framework while identifying critical gaps that remain.  We will first discuss how the BISC-2 site may provide new insights into the political-economy of trade at the permeable boarder of British and Spanish spheres of competing influence; and into the relationship between imperial centers and their often non-compliant peripheries.  Finally, BISC-2 suggests a rethinking of broader archaeological approaches to shipwrecks -- and new understandings of their relevance to terrestrial archaeology, namely: as sites that paradigmatically embody "process" in two senses: 1) as locations in which repeated human intervention introduces methodological challenges without nullifying the potential of these sites to speak meaningfully and robstly to the past; and 2) as sites that require team-based collaborative models in order to understand what are in essence moments of arrested social,economic, and political interaction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Trade at The Border of Colonial Empires in late 18th Century North America: Historical, Methodological and Theoretical Insights from the Archeological Study of the "English China" (BISC-2) Shipwreck Site   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 688