Shipwrecked Heritage of the Old and New World: Owning and Owning up to the ‘Midas Touch’ of the Colonial Past

Summary

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

The archaeological past rarely maps perfectly to the borders of current nation states, leaving stakeholder groups to constantly renegotiate boundaries. Located in international water and hosting assemblages from a variety of transitory groups, shipwrecks of the ‘Columbian Exchange’ have prompted Spain’s former colonies to re-order ownership boundaries by claiming that artifacts are not located in their geopolitical borders, but in their intangible pasts. Stakeholders from Peru to Colombia have argued that material such as coins constitute both a protected national resource and a manifestation of indigenous labor, a view that is increasingly granted legitimacy with the acknowledgement of intangible history, but is not so reflected in legal structures that determine the objects’ fates. This paper analyzes the legal trends from the results of 37 shipwreck disputes, tracking the most common ownership outcomes of colonial ships that are brought to court. From private hands to national museums, these different ownerships demonstrate a ‘Midas Touch’ of colonialism, in which Spain’s contact with gold turns all gold to Spanish. In granting greater legal protection to historical ties to the nation state rather than archaeological links to a former colony, current management schemes disadvantage a co-custodianship that could potentially protect sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25533