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Gifts, Goods and Money: Comparing currency and circulation systems in past societies
One of the most momentous cross-cultural collisions occurred in the Caribbean in 1492, heralding a period of rapid change in both ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Worlds. During the early years of the colonial period, when new relationships were being established, material objects became active agents in the interactions between the indigenous Taíno and the Spanish. The Taíno gifted the Spanish with objects that had significance in their own world, in an attempt to enmesh the Spanish into Taíno socio-political and economic networks. In turn, Spanish objects entered into Taíno value systems. Glass and jet beads, mirrors and brass ornaments were integrated into prestigious objects, such as the two surviving Taíno cotton sculptures that form the focus of this paper: a belt in the collections of the Weltmuseum Wien and a composite sculpture in the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’, Rome. These pieces offer a glimpse into how Old World exotics were reinterpreted and integrated into indigenous value systems during a period of cultural transition and change. Full, open access volume: http://www.archaeopress.com/Public/displayProductDetail.asp?id=%7B75FFD4AC-966D-406F-A3A7-CBE6F4CF613B%7D
BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers
To produce “a pleasing effect”: Taíno shell and stone cibas and Spanish cuentas in the early colonial Caribbean2018 •
This article serves as an introduction to the use of beads – both indigenous and European – in surviving examples of body ornaments from the early colonial Caribbean: a cemí/belt in the collections of Rome’s Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “L. Pigorini,” a belt from the Weltmuseum Wien, and a cache of beads in a wooden vessel from the collections of the Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico. These artifacts offer insights into how the Taíno may have adopted newly introduced foreign goods, aligning them to their own aesthetics and world view. Glass beads, acquired via visitors from foreign lands entered into a well-established repertoire of indigenous shell, stone and potentially botanical beads, introducing different colors and finishes, but nevertheless fitting within traditional cultural expressions and value systems.
Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies
Treating 'Trifles': the Indigenous Adoption of European Material Goods in Early Colonial Hispaniola (1492-15502019 •
This paper discusses the cultural implications of European materials recovered from early colonial indigenous spaces on the island of Hispaniola. The exchange of exotic valuables was vital for the emergent relationships between European colonists and indigenous peoples during the late 15th and early 16th century Caribbean. As the colonial presence became more pressing and intercultural dynamics more complex, formerly distinct material worlds increasingly entangled. Archaeologists have long given minimal attention to these material correlates of indigenous colonial transition. Nevertheless, more than fifty years of archaeological work in Hispaniola has revealed a select number of indigenous sites yielding such foreign artefacts, or objects with European influence, occasionally appearing in reworked, repurposed, or copied forms. Among these are glass beads, metal items, and glazed ceramics, found in a variety of contexts and ranging from singular finds to direct associations to indigenous valuables. This paper presents an overview of these findings in order to explore indigenous agencies in the ways of handling these objects related to the differential impacts of colonial power on the island. As such, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the materiality of things in these encounters and the transformations they brought about in indigenous material culture repertoires.
The results of AMS dating and wood identification on three carvings recovered from the southern Lesser Antilles (Dominica, Battowia and Trinidad) are discussed, placing the objects in the context of events and interactions that spanned the region’s prehistory from the fifth to fifteenth centuries AD. Each hints at a rich legacy – of their passage through the hands of those who invested in them (whether through making, using, trading, collecting or displaying them) in a process that sometimes covers vast geographical and cultural distances. They reflect the social dynamics and fluid interconnections between Caribbean peoples – and between people and objects – that bound the region in a praxis of materiality, mobility and exchange.
"An Archaeology of Exchange is primarily an archaeology of human sociality and anti-sociality. Nevertheless, archaeological studies of exchange are numerous and varied, and archaeologists do not always approach exchange as a social mechanism, concentrating rather on the cultural, economic or political implications of exchange. Even so, at times it is worth retracing the implicit theoretical steps that archaeologists have taken and look at human sociality through the eyes of exchange as something new. This will be undertaken here by concentrating on the exchange of social valuables in the later part of the Late Ceramic Age of the Greater and Lesser Antilles (AD 1000/1100-1492). Questions concerning this exchange will be framed in a novel mix of theories - such as Costly Signalling Theory coupled with the paradox of keeping-while-giving and the notion of gene/culture co-evolution joined with Complex Adaptive System theory. Still, all these theories can be related back to the concept of exchange as put forward by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss in his famous "Essai sur le don" of 1924/25. This theoretical framework will be put to the test by an extensive case-study of a specific category of Late Ceramic Age social valuables: shell faces, which have an area of distribution that ranges from central Cuba to the Île de Ronde in the Grenadines. The study of these enigmatic artefacts will uncover novel insights on the nature and use of social valuables in the Late Ceramic Age by communities and individuals."
Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas Archaeological Case Studies
Breaking and Making Identities: Transformations of Ceramic Repertoires in Early Colonial Hispaniola. In Hofman and Keehnen (eds) Material Encounters and indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas. pp 124-1452019 •
This chapter investigates transcultural processes within intercultural communications on the islands of Hispaniola and Cubagua. The material reflection of this multicultural society and the agency of the enslaved and colonized are studied through the continuities and changes in the manufacture between pre-colonial and colonial, non-European ceramics present at early colonial sites. Both Amerindian (local and non-local), Spanish, and African presences are studied within the ceramic assemblage. This study assesses the extent to which indigenous pottery traditions disappeared and the amount in which new techniques and forms appeared.
Five wooden sculptures from the pre-contact Caribbean, long held in museum collections, are here dated and given a context for the first time. The examples studied were made from dense Guaiacum wood, carved, polished and inlaid with shell fastened with resin. Dating the heartwood, sapwood and resins takes key examples of ‘Classic’ Taíno art back to the tenth century AD, and suggests that some objects were treasured and refurbished over centuries. The authors discuss the symbolic properties of the wood and the long-lived biographies of some iconic sculptures.
2011 •
2016 •
Andes; Chachapoya; Spanish Conquest; Inka; Nueva Cadiz bead; glass beads; shell beads' Spondylus; Indigenous; Peru; Ecuador; Venezuela; bead material; bead color; 16th Century
Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (2013) 4675-4687
Birdmen, cemís and duhos: material studies and AMS 14C dating of Pre-Hispanic Caribbean wood sculptures in the British MuseumThis paper presents 19 AMS radiocarbon dates from nine pre-Hispanic Caribbean (Taíno/Lucayan wooden sculptures in the British Museum collections, provenanced to Jamaica, Hispaniola and the Bahamas. Together with strontium isotope results and wood and resin identifications, these data build a material and chronological context for some of the most recognised examples of Taíno art - from duhos (ceremonial seats) and cemís (free standing depictions of deities, ancestors and spirits) to canopied stands used to hold hallucinogenic drugs during the cohoba ceremony. Each sculpture widens our understanding of Caribbean carving traditions, stylistic variation, chronologies and material resource utilisation. A group of three sculptures recovered from Carpenters Mountains, Jamaica, carved by AD 1300 and brought together as a ceremonial ‘set’, each appear to have had their inlays renewed over a century later, suggesting long-term use. Three key examples of the main Caribbean duho categories (high-back, low-back and extended), provide insights into the diversity of styles present in the region post-AD 1100. The British Museum’s corpus enables an exploration of regional styles, and potentially the work of individual artists.
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