Whose worlds anyway? Multispecies and non-anthropocentric approaches to Caribbean histories

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Drawn on a wall between two crosses, this is how an Indigenous zemi (object-person) appears in a cave shrine. In a midden surrounded by fish bones and thimbles, this is how a pig’s head ended up in an encomienda household. Wrapped in hammocks against the insects, this is how labourers, enslaved people, and colonisers slept at night in goldmines across the islands. Food, bodies, and beliefs were locations of ontological bridging and difference in the violent and unequal world of the sixteenth century Caribbean. In this paper we take a multispecies and non-anthropocentric approach to explore how diverse communities, including colonizing animals such as pigs, object-persons, and materials, created a radically new post-Columbian world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52803