Imperial Fortifications, Native Lifestyle: Indigenising Colonial Chile

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Chile was the most important and complex borderland of the Spanish Empire (1550–1818), in which colonial power and Indigenous resistance were contested over centuries. Spaniards struggled to subjugate the Reche-Mapuche –the local population–, and eventually conceded their independence upon the acknowledgement of the Spanish King in 1641. Years later, in the area of Valdivia, which gave access to the Pacific, the Spaniards and the Reche agreed on the construction of an intricate defence system to protect the Spanish Empire from the Dutch and the British attacks. The protection of the furthermost borderland of the Empire and the maintenance of a permanent army drained all the resources of the General Captaincy of Chile, leaving the colonists dependant on the Reche communities to survive. This paper explores both the materiality of fear embodied by the colonial fortifications, and the indigenised everyday life in the fortresses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow