Exploring the Matter of Mary in Early Colonial Ecuador: Indigenous Appropriations and Material Substrates

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper foregrounds the agency of indigenous peoples in the equatorial Andes in their interactions with the early evangelizers of Christianity. Looking at both historical and contemporary evidence, I consider the material responses of native people to the “unnatural” worldview that Spanish ecclesiasts sought to impose on them and the ways in which they negotiated and appropriated different elements of this foreign doctrine. I highlight the particular case of the Virgin of El Quinche and her relation to the Ecuadorian Oriente, as well as a lesser-known Virgin associated with the tiny community of Shanshipampa. In the paper, I focus on the materiality of the various representations of the Virgin found around Ecuador and how this relates to earlier Andean understandings of “the sacred.” Through the lens of materiality, the ways in which local political ecologies are shaped in conjunction with other-than-human entities comes into clearer focus.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow