This book began as a session organized by Christine D. Beaule and John G. Douglass at the SAA annual meeting in 2018. Subsequently, the session was selected as an SAA–Amerind Advanced Seminar, during which authors further developed the focus and themes for the volume. This productive process resulted in an edited volume that is cohesive in its focus yet provides many angles on the Spanish Empire due to the broad temporal and geographical scope of its 11 case studies.
Beaule and Douglass set out to examine the expansion of the Spanish Empire and its impact on colonized peoples from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries across the globe. This complex process involved diverse Indigenous populations and the movement of peoples, practices, and goods across the vast Spanish Empire. As the project progressed, two intertwined themes emerged as useful explanatory tools for the diverse colonial situations under study: place making and pluralism.
Place making refers to the creation of meaningful places through a process where a geographical location becomes a place “within a broader social and environmental landscape” (p. 4). This can involve the construction of physical features as well as the use of material culture. Place making has both geographical and social dimensions.
Pluralism, inevitable in all colonial settings, is a second focus of the volume, and it plays an important role in place making. In the case of the Spanish Empire, pluralism was extraordinarily complex, encompassing Spanish colonists and the Indigenous peoples of a particular colony. The colonial enterprise also involved moving subjects from one colony to another, as well as the importation of African slaves. A colonial caste system developed, yet a variety of factors—the role of individuals of mixed ancestry as well as cultural markers such as clothing and food—sometimes led to fluid identities and movement across castes. Over time, colonists themselves became increasingly diverse in their ancestry and cultural heritage.
These two themes, place making and pluralism, are closely intertwined. Place making has a geographical dimension, yet it also involves giving culturally specific meaning to a location. Additionally, place making has a strong social dimension in that it creates or modifies a group's place in a socially or politically diverse setting, a process linked to pluralism. This connection between place making and pluralism is reflected in all of the diverse case studies.
Archaeological data provide key evidence for both place making and pluralism. Throughout the volume, authors discuss the presence of foreign goods and interpret their significance. The adoption of foreign goods by Indigenous peoples is not simply evidence for accommodation or colonial domination because these goods also played a role in behaviors that promoted cultural persistence and resistance for Indigenous peoples. Imported goods sometimes were used as markers of prestige or symbolic capital. Foreign goods were adopted for everyday use as well as for special use but were typically used in Indigenous ways.
The volume begins with an introductory chapter by Beaule and Douglass that discusses the concepts of place making and pluralism and provides an overview of four centuries of Spanish colonial rule. This is followed by 11 case studies that focus on West Africa (Christopher R. DeCorse), the Caribbean (Corinne L. Hofman, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, and Jorge Ulloa Hung), North America (Christopher Rodning, Michelle Pigott, and Hannah Hoover, U.S. Southeast; Steve A. Tomka, Texas and northeast Mexico; Stacie M. King, Oaxaca, Mexico), Central America (Laura Matthew and William R. Fowler), South America (Kevin Lane, Central Andes; Julie Wiersema, Nueva Granada), Southeast Asia (Martin Gibbs and David Roe, Melanesia), and the Pacific (Stephen Acabado and Grace Barretto-Tesoro, Philippines; James M. Bayman, Boyd M. Dixon, Sandra Montón-Subías, and Natalia Moragas Segura, Guam).
The chapters are ordered chronologically, based on the dates of initial colonization efforts in each location. This is helpful because it is a subtle reminder—provided one reads the chapters in order—that Spanish colonial strategies and policies changed over the course of four centuries as circumstances changed.
Given the geographical breadth and temporal depth of the case studies, the chapters illustrate “great variability in Indigenous and Spanish geographic and social place making in a rapidly changing landscape” as well as “creative processes of identity formation, such as the introduction and/or manipulation of new ethnic categories and new meanings to old categories” (p. 22). Not surprisingly, the intensity of Spanish contact and control impacted Indigenous responses. This is reflected in an apparent pattern in which the intensity of contact influenced the ways that foreign goods were incorporated into Indigenous practice. Similarly, the intensity of Spanish control influenced the process of place making, with Indigenous and African populations having more opportunities to engage in place making in locations with less Spanish control. Despite the considerable diversity in time and place, these case studies demonstrate that despite Spanish efforts to dominate, “indigenous cultures persevered, albeit perhaps not in the same form as they had prior to conquest” (p. 24).
