Garden Sacrifice: Making Sense of Changing Livelihoods In Late-19th Century Bogotá

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The second half of the 19th century was an unstable period in the history of Colombia. In cities such as Bogotá, drastic political and economic reforms, inspired by radical interpretations of liberal values, allowed some privileged urban sectors to connect with global networks of production and consumption, while most other people remained trapped in oppressive conditions inherited from colonial times. In this paper, we draw on an archaeobotanical approach to a domestic garden from the late 1800s to explore how this transition towards a full-fledged capitalist system impacted the intimate ecosystems of upper-middle classes in Republican Bogotá. Specifically, we document how largely self-sustainable backyards, typical of an earlier grid of urban lived-spaces in the city, were eventually sacrificed to the logics of market economies, paving the way for untenable models of subsistence that have, in the long-run, degraded the quality of life in the foundational area of contemporary Bogotá.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow