Archaeology of Mercantilism: An Analysis of Vessels and Passengers in Puerto Rico, 1510-1545

Summary

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a research project that uses the registries of vessels(Relación de Navíos) from the Royal Treasury of Puerto Rico to study the quantity of people that arrived to the island during the first half of the 16th century, at the height of the Spanish colonization. The main objective of this research is to quantify the passengers and vessels that arrived at the two main ports in Puerto Rico: San Juan and San Germán. The incorporation of this documentary data is being used as a new approach to understand early colonial development and transplantation of the Spanish European system to the Caribbean by comparing and contrasting the information regarding the entry of vessels with the quantity of people. How can this information, focusing on ethnicity, profession, and gender help us understand the early conquest in Puerto Rico from an archaeological perspective?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016   •
• Current Multidisciplinary Research Approaches in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 836