Copper And Copper-Alloy Artifacts On The Borderlands Of New Spain- The COTBONS Project At 5

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the 55 years since the founding of the SHA, copper and copper-alloy vessels and other objects associated with the Spanish colonial and Mexican Republican borderlands in North America have received scant attention from archaeologists. To rectify this shortcoming in 2017 the “Copper on the Borderlands of New Spain” or COTBONS Project was initiated to systematically survey, describe, and classify these materials. Over these five years, hundreds of artifacts from terrestrial and shipwreck sites and objects with poor provenience in museum and church collections from Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas have been weighed, measured, photographed, drawn, and assayed with pXRF. Juxtaposing these descriptive endeavors against historic art and the documentary record, and the ethnography of contemporary Mexican copper smiths, is creating a picture of how these artifacts were made, used, and known in the past. This presentation provides an overview of our findings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2022 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology