Towards a Comparative Analysis of African-Influenced Ceramic Motifs in the Spanish Americas: Hispaniola and Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this poster we present a ceramic phenomenon occurring at two Spanish colonial sites of differing spatial and temporal provenience in the Spanish Americas. The appearance of various African influenced comb-dragged and wavy line motifs in Cotuí and Concepción de la Vega (early colonial Caribbean, 1495-1562) as well as at the haciendas of San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca and San Joseph de la Nasca (middle-to-late colonial Peru, 1619-1767) have raised many questions about the people making these ceramics. Here we present an initial comparative study of the decorative elements, ceramic technologies, and site context of previously undocumented phenomena related to innovation and cultural confluence in ceramic production. By comparing the material from two disparate Spanish colonial contexts these ceramics offer us indications of how enslaved African actors maintained social memory and expressed social agency.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24428