Changing and Exchanging Social Values of Metals: The Integration of Tumbaga and Iron Objects in Indigenous Graves in the Colombia’s Caribbean Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Although the colonial order between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries transformed the use and trading of metal objects employed in indigenous funerary practices in Colombia’s Caribbean region, it also enabled local goldwork traditions to continue. Particularly, in the lower-Magdalena River region, the “Malibú” buried their dead with typical tumbaga objects from a long-lasting regional tradition, along with iron tools traded and worked by either Spanish or African enslaved people. Here, I suggest how, even though the colonial institutions tried to reduce the mobility of indigenous people by making villages and encomiendas, the great mobility of the “Malibú” along the river could have had an impact on the intra-regional trading networks for metallic objects. Stylistic and compositional analyses of tumbaga and iron objects at two archaeological sites, San Felipe and La Pasión, enabled the coexistence and integration of metal technologies of different origins to be described. On the one hand, performing chemical analyses of the tumbaga objects allowed the lost-wax casting and depletion gilding techniques, which indigenous goldsmiths before the Spanish conquest were experts at, to be characterized. On the other, stylistic and compositional analyses of iron provide a first chemical approach in Colombia to suggest origins of the metal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39039.0