Portrait of a Port: Industry and Ideology in El Salvador (1805-1900)

Summary

The impact of the Industrial Revolution affected El Salvador far more slowly in the pre-independence period due to the Spanish trade monopoly. Yet Atlantic World demand for commodities such as balsam, cacao, coffee, indigo, and sugar steadily increased through the early Republican period of independence, encouraging entrepreneurs to invest in the technologies of the nineteenth century. Technologies like the steamship and railroad inextricably connected El Salvador to global markets, resulting in a material landscape composed of imports from Britain, Germany, Ireland, North America, and Spain. Through terrestrial and underwater explorations in 2015 and 2017 at the port of Acajutla, patterns in the material culture—specifically the ceramics—began to emerge allowing a first glimpse at the depiction of nineteenth-century El Salvador.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Colonialism’s End? The archaeological consequences of the Grito de Dolores

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 152