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Many archaeological projects of the contemporary past examine sites of abandonment, ruination, decay, and devastation. This contribution takes a step back, looking at the historical trajectories that have created the conditions for abandonment, ruination, and so on, in the first place. Before a site can become abandoned, it needs to be occupied, a practice that is inherently violent in capitalist contexts. Taking inspiration from family history, I offer a visual rendering of a nineteenth-century explorer's (failed) attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage, which eventually led him to occupy a small Arctic Archipelago that is today a Russian military outpost. In the fragmentary comments accompanying my artwork, I propose an archaeological engagement with the hauntings of this Arctic landscape that does not only expose how imperial encounters are embedded within capitalist exploits but inspire us to imagine a radically different political past and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent excavations at Mission La Purísima Concepción identified social divisions linked to status hierarchies within the Native village,' Amuwu. The recovery of an earthen floor under a roof tile collapse represented a single room in an adobe structure where a Chumash family lived. In the backyard, a dense midden deposit exposed a dumping and activity area for residents of the building. Further north of the structure, in an area not associated with the adobe building, archaeological investigations uncovered an expansive concentration of refuse, suggesting it is the likely area where traditional tule-thatched houses once stood. Materials from the northernmost and southernmost sections of the rancheria indicate differences linked to social stratification, including distinctions in the shell bead money economy, food preparation and consumption practices, and the display of wealth. However, status was not determined by those who displayed more or less "Spanish" or "Native" traits. Instead, ranked positions were integrated with traditional Chumash practices and were later reinterpreted in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the analysis of faunal remains from refuse features associated with the Native Californian living quarters at Mission Santa Clara de Asìs, the article examines Indigenous diet within this colonial mission settlement. In Alta California, Native Californians from differing sociolinguistic groups were relocated to Spanish missions, creating an ever shifting pluralistic society. Within these mission settlements, Native Californians were tasked with maintaining the vast agricultural fields for which they received ingredients for two Spanish-style meals, atole and pozole. This study examines the diet of Native Californian families living within Mission Santa Clara, specifically focusing on the breakage patterns of cattle bones and the communal preparation, cooking, and consumption of these daily meals. These results illustrate change and continuity of foodway practices, expanding our understanding of mission political economies and Native Californian persistence within this colonial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plantation as a fusion of rural industry and commercial agriculture has become a shorthand for the the intensification of land-use, circulation of commodities, and the organization of labor concomitant with the modern world. While not the only place where plantations existed, the Atlantic is the context in which most archaeological research has taken place leaving untested certain assumptions about the development of the plantation. and the regions which informed its varied materializations in the modern world. By extending the the methods and approaches employed by archaeologists studying plantations to South India, we decenter plantation narratives and show how Indian Ocean commercial agriculture and rural industry also enabled the modern world. This article reports on results from the first phase of the Colonial Tharangambadi Archaeological Survey (CTAS). The goal of CTAS was to document changing settlement patterns, settlement organization, and material assemblage through a systematic landscape survey in the former Danish colonial enclave, Tranquebar (Tharangambadi). Specifically, we documented one South Indian settlement formation devoted to commercial agriculture called "gardens," which has origins in the sixth century CE, or earlier, and how they were used outside the town's walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We argue that from historically distinctive agrarian facilities geared to commercial production, these plantation-like rural industries developed quite broadly using vulnerable labor to produce plant commodities in high volume for international markets. The particularities of plantation studies are enriched by considerations of parallel developments under similar conditions, as illustrated by India's lesser-known Danish colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an archaeology of Fort La Cloche, a nineteenth-century Hudson’s Bay Company post in Georgian Bay (Lake Huron, Canada), this paper explores parallels between historical archaeology and posthumanism. The posthumanities identify and critique three key problems familiar to historical archaeologists: (1) the arbitrary prioritization of certain types of historical actors (usually White, male, settler colonial) as the apex and standard for all humanity; (2) dichotomous modes of thought that cleave the world into discrete (opposed) categories like “nature” versus “culture”; and (3) human exceptionalism, which frames human beings as fundamentally different—and separate—from all other living and nonliving things surrounding them. An archaeology of La Cloche offers insights into how these broader philosophical goals compare with the work of historical archaeologists. The intersection of the archival record with the archaeological collection, a large and varied assemblage of patent medicine bottles, porcelain doll parts, buttons, shotgun casings, and much more, provides new perspectives on the fur trade; it offers insights into the broader community at La Cloche, peopled not just by powerful company men but by children, woman, workers of various kinds and, of course, Ojibwe and other Indigenous peoples. Historical archaeology also focuses on the material conditions of the fort, documenting complicated and sticky relationships of dependence between people of all sorts and humble, nonhuman things. The paper concludes that historical archaeology and posthumanism stand to benefit from further engagement with one another, making recommendations for further growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After nearly two hundred years of continuous occupation, the Spanish port town of St. Augustine, Florida, came under British control in 1763. With the arrival of the new regime, noticeable changes occurred in the colony, including the mass exodus of Spanish residents and a new emphasis on plantation agriculture as in other areas of British America. Yet, Florida’s “British Period” lasted only until 1784, and this article examines the evidence for it in St. Augustine collections at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Vessel form analysis of ceramics from four different sites in the city are compared to both Spanish St. Augustine and the nearby British urban center of Charleston to understand the material signatures of these two different colonial societies. By building an analytical focus on ceramics through the lens of consumption, the meaning of the archaeological trends is considered through questions of identity and colonialism in a more marginal locale in the British Atlantic world. Given that the British St. Augustine assemblages shared similarities, and all had distinctly “British” ceramics, their use in facilitating shared dining practices that formed social identities in the newly formed colony is further examined in local documents. Examining how material culture functioned in the social performances of dining practices in British St. Augustine can distinguish how mass-produced goods were made meaningful in different colonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish colonial incursions into highland Guatemala encountered a vibrant assemblage of entangled people, places, plants, and things. Colonists sought to marshall this assemblage into various accumulation projects through strategies of colonial control that re-ordered the landscape and its settlements, enabling new forms of surveillance, tracking, subject making, and exploitation of Native communities and laborers. This "grid" of control proved effective in many regards, particularly due to the preservation of the extant assemblage of infrastructure, social relations, and relations of production encountered. Rather than fully disrupt it, colonists accommodated this assemblage and sought to salvage value from its persistence. However, an ambivalence emerged from this dependence on the refracted assemblage of highland Guatemala; an assemblage that remained outside of colonists full control and made the colonial grid a thoroughly leaky one as people and things became or remained entangled in ways that subverted the goals of colonial control and afforded the persistence of Native communities and relations through, between and beyond the violence of colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missions and indigenous villages are commonly investigated contexts for indigenous responses to Spanish colonialism in the American Southwest. In early colonial New Mexico, colonists' households were also a venue for interaction and exchange of information between Pueblos and Spanish. Using the concept of hybridity, I explore seventeenth-century Spanish ranches in northern New Mexico for the interactions between Spanish colonists and Pueblo wives, servants, slaves, and laborers. The architecture, foodways, and artifacts, show an interplay between Pueblo and Spanish ways of making do suggesting that Pueblo peoples contributed in substantial ways to the nature of these households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an introduction to the study of European migration into Asia-Pacific through the case study of northern Taiwan. Here, several Spanish and Dutch colonial outposts were founded during the first part of the seventeenth century. Since 2011 and up to 2016 we have uncovered six burials of the cemetery of the Spanish colony of San Salvador de Kelang (Heping Dao, Keelung) (1626–42). The cemetery was associated with the Convento de Todos los Santos, Convent of All Saints, also discovered anew during our excavations. DNA analysis shows that at least one of the individuals was of European descent. This finding is unprecedented in Asia-Pacific within this early chronological framework. The archaeological evidence stands in contrast to the scarcity of contemporary written information relating to death and burials, both in Spanish and Dutch sources. We use the written sources to contextualize the archaeological data, inquiring about the life trajectories of the European colonists in Taiwan, people who truly lived in a global world. We aim to synthesize these data to create a documentary background for future research towards a better understanding of the European migration patterns into Asia-Pacific within cultural, biological, and demographic dimensions. This study offers a valuable contrast with research on the same topic elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zooarchaeological research at Spanish colonial missions in the U.S.-Mexico border region indicates that cattle ranching formed the basis for economic colonialism in the region. Animal remains from Mission Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera add to this expanding body of research and demonstrate heterogeneity in mission economic strategies, particularly influenced by local ecology, and sociopolitical history. Located at a higher elevation, subjected to many years of livestock raiding, and rarely hosting a resident priest, the O'odham community at Mission Cocóspera continued to rely a great deal on the exploitation of wild game, even as they adopted cattle ranching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we look at the ways in which rock art encapsulates and expresses the tension between tradition and innovation in northern Australia during the period of European colonization. The appearance of new motifs and techniques for producing rock art in the recent past sits alongside the continuation of "traditional" practices reflecting thousands of years of artistic expression. Using case studies from Arnhem Land, we reflect on both ethnographic and archaeological evidence in order to interrogate the ways in which innovation impacted upon and was used by Indigenous groups to navigate contact. Our findings suggest that technological conservatism and the resistance to new technologies by Aboriginal communities is both considered and partial, with the overriding logic being about minimizing the disruption of specific values conceptualised as traditional, rather than eliminating or avoiding all outside influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue arise from the Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes session held at the 2017 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada. That session focused on the role of status and power in shaping colonial interactions and identities throughout the Andes during the fifteenth to seventeenth century CE. The papers in this issue examine how Inka and colonial period individuals (indigenous, African, Iberian, mestizo, etc.) selectively incorporated or rejected Imperial goods, and how differing levels of access to these goods may have influenced social status, health, and relationships with imperial actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power of archaeology as an arm of postcolonial studies lies with its focus on the material dimensions of colonialism and its ability to interrogate the role of things in negotiating the terrain of cultural dissonance. This paper contributes to the postcolonial critique by taking up the matter of temporality and historicity from an indigeno-centric perspective, offering an analysis of the notion of temporal plurality via a focus on the "time of materials." The context of the study is a specific mortuary assemblage from a shaft tomb in the northern Andean highlands of Ecuador dating to the early Colonial period. This example is used to illustrate the way objects, as elements of heterogeneous assemblages, can create distinct temporalities that work to contravene or resist assimilation to the regime of historicity. The assemblage analyzed here conveys an ontology of temporal plurality that encompassed both radical continuity and radical change. As one example among many, it serves to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about the universality of historical time, the "natural" segregation of past, present, and future, and the significance of European artifacts in indigenous contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I reflect on how the series of essays in this themed issue map out an emerging orientation in Andeanist archaeology, the transconquest perspective. Growing out of scholars' engagements with the local dimensions of Inka and Spanish rule and the methodological and ontological divides that distinguish "history" and "prehistory," the transconquest perspective attends to the affective connections that constitute polities and shape imperial transitions. I discuss its development, consider the ways in which these articles put it into practice, and suggest two directions in which transconquest archaeologies are pointing the study of colonialism and imperialism, in the Andes and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the politics of indigenous foodways in early colonial Peru, examining the processes by which indigenous households adapted to demographic stress, resettlement, and evangelization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE. We examine faunal and botanical data from two planned towns (reducciones) located in Peru's Zaña Valley—Carrizales and Mocupe Viejo. Inter- and intra-site comparison of food procurement and diet reveal different strategies and timing in the ways that Eurasian products were incorporated into native foodways, suggesting that while Old World animal domesticates were rapidly integrated into the indigenous diet, plant domesticates tied to the Iberian palate were not as readily adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-eighteenth century around the town of Andagua in the high Southern Peruvian Andes, local indigenous residents nearly incited a rebellion rejecting regional authorities from Arequipa with ancestor cults as a locus of resistance. Subsequently, colonial officials burned ancestral mummies, in attempts to eradicate Andean religious beliefs and practices. Through the use of multiple methods and an archaeological perspective, this article examines how residents became "rebels and idolaters." Challenging the universal subject and recognizing how subjectivities are historical and particular, I review how identities emerge through the production of places, forming relationships with the landscape across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archaeological record indicates the use of salmon and a wide range of terrestrial mammals at sites spanning the last millennium in the vicinity of the Nautley River on the Nechako Plateau of central British Columbia. In particular, a long record of sustained use of small and medium bodied fur-bearing mammals, especially beaver, rabbit, and muskrat, is evident, which neither prey-selection, nor fur trade intensification models adequately explain. Instead, the usage of diverse small prey is best understood in the context of the contingencies and long-term structure of the region's salmon fishery, the social networks between communities and places, the various uses people had for these animals, and the meanings of their relationship to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deer Creek is an eighteenth-century fortified site in Oklahoma that is featured in dozens of publications yet was not excavated until 2016. While archaeologists today acknowledge the site as a Wichita village, others have insisted Deer Creek is a European fort. Historical narratives bereft of archaeological investigation can prove problematic and have minimized the role of Wichita communities in economic relationships. The Deer Creek site was just one of many villages in the region where Indigenous peoples held significant power as they negotiated with European travelers and archaeological work can reveal the perspective of those who there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents results of attribute analysis of copper-base metal artifacts from early colonial upper Great Lakes archaeological contexts. Patterns of variation were identified, providing evidence for cultural and technological heterogeneity in the production methods and uses of such objects through time at a regional scale. Interrelated factors that influenced observed artifact attributes include contexts of use and deposition, socially structured trading partnerships causing differential availability of raw material, and aesthetic preferences of craftworkers or their communities. Results demonstrate the utility of comparing technological practices evident in diverse material assemblages to investigate regional-scale interaction in contexts of colonialism and intercultural contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global processes associated with the expansion of colonialism and the emergence of capitalist economies after 1500 were often driven by a desire to create new capital via the acquisition of land and resources, with severe implications for Indigenous peoples. These processes were highly variable, and strongly shaped by the local circumstances encountered at the periphery of European networks of commerce and trade. A number of researchers have suggested that a particularly acute phase of violence and landscape expropriation, sometimes referred to as war capitalism or terra nullius colonialism, underpinned the establishment of colonial settlements and new economic enterprises. This paper characterises processes of colonization and the establishment of capitalist industry within a discrete study area in Cape York Peninsula, northeastern Australia. In particular, we aim to examine in an holistic fashion the nature of encounters and interactions between Indigenous custodians and settler-colonists between 1860 and 1939, using a documentary archaeology approach combined with qualitative data analysis methods. We demonstrate that while violence of various forms was a routine aspect of interactions, a holistic approach to analysis of available data enables the development of a more nuanced understanding of the contours and pattern of colonialism and the nature and implications of different forms of violence for Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the U.S. Civil War, groups of ex-Confederates arrived in Belize as clashes with Caste War Maya reached their peak, resulting in more frequent Maya raiding of British and Creole logging camps. Cross-examining ethnohistoric and archaeological data from Maya, ex-Confederate, Creole, and British sites in northern Belize, we aim to better understand the distinct identities and myriad relationships of these odd bedfellows. The colonizers (British and ex-Confederates) had divergent agendas, but each used limited supplies of Euro-American imports, namely guns and tobacco products, in the remote colonial frontier to form powerful economic dependencies with Maya and Creole groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modified ceramic disks have been recovered from historic-era sites across the Americas. Small unperforated disks are commonly interpreted as gaming pieces and larger perforated disks are often classified as spindle whorls. Here, we examine these interpretations in light of collections from three colonial-era sites in central California: Mission San Antonio de Padua, Mission San José, and the Rancho San Andrés Castro Adobe. We argue that the small unperforated disks from our study sites were two-sided dice. These gaming pieces facilitated the social cohesion of Native people living in the large, multiethnic Indigenous communities that formed around Spanish colonial missions and later Mexican-era ranchos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the presence of Sámi in central and southern Sweden in the seventeenth century. The Nordic countries have generally been believed to be ethnically homogeneous, with the** colonial subjects not being present in the center of these empires. If the multicultural aspects of early modern Nordic countries are at all discussed, Sámi and other ethnic groups are understood as peoples living on the outskirts of the empires. This notion has cemented an idea that cities such as Copenhagen or Stockholm were inhabited solely by peoples from southern Scandinavia and the continent. Drawing on the experience of the role and presence of indigenous people from the Americas and the Arctic in cities such as London in the seventeenth century, this paper examines the multi-ethnic aspects of early modern Stockholm, capital of Sweden, as an imperial center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On September 15 and 16, 2017, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University hosted a workshop of 20 archaeologists from across the Americas and the Caribbean. Workshop proceedings demonstrate how a focus on Afro-Latin America challenges crucial concerns in archaeology. Likewise, workshop discussions showed the transformative contributions that archaeology makes to Afro-Latin American studies, including deeper understanding of the dynamics of African diaspora, racialization, colonialism, early modern economies, social hierarchies and slavery, consumerism, aesthetic interventions, and contemporary struggles for sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing the results of several decades of excavation in the center of Melbourne, Australia, provides the opportunity to reflect on what archaeological evidence has to contribute to understandings of the colonial city. The city has been shaped by its role as a colonial entrepot, a gold rush port, and a nineteenth-century metropolitan center. Its rich archaeological record derives from the intersection of heritage controls and a development boom. Data from archaeological excavations drives new perspectives on Melbourne itself, revealing a city intimately connected with the gold rush boom that fuelled its growth. Archaeological data also shed light on the specific and distinctive historical circumstances that influenced the development of cities established in the nineteenth century, including transnational migration and trade along with emerging concerns over public health and sanitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Dutch and indigenous adaptation processes of foodways in the colonial Dutch East Indies, using seventeenth to early nineteenth-century archaeological evidence from Banten, Java. Banten was a global trading center and the focal point of the expansion in Asia of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Its cosmopolitan and multinational society was already apparent when the Dutch arrived in 1596. Our research suggests that the Dutch in Banten adapted to using locally produced utilitarian earthenware instead of importing European vessels or having European-style cookware made in Banten. Banten's pre-existing market-oriented urban society made many of the basic necessities available for the VOC garrison in Banten. Perhaps equally important in facilitating Dutch adaptation to local foodways was the presence of local women and Asian cooks in their daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's quarantine regulations have their roots in colonial practice. This paper is concerned with the 'matter' of quarantine-its location, spatialization, and materialization-and the ways in which it contributed to the colonial agenda. Through an exploration of Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station, quarantine is shown to be a technology through which the colony and the continent were framed as simultaneously pure and vulnerable. These colonial roots of quarantine practice are then brought back to the present, drawing on Stoler's (2008) concept of 'imperial debris' to contemplate the contemporary ruins, both material and ideological, of colonial quarantine practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth century the United States Federal government established off-reservation boarding schools that sought to accomplish an internal colonialism of American Indian communities by forcefully assimilating them into mainstream American culture. The landscape of these institutions was a primary tool to achieve their assimilationist goals. This research examines the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School through archival, archaeological and oral history evidence. The landscape and material record of this school also indicate that students vigorously resisted the institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated some 600 mi (965 km) east of North Carolina, the island of Bermuda is Britain's oldest surviving colony. While much of the British Empire has been dismantled, Bermuda remains within the Imperial fold, and is today designated a 'British overseas territory.' Within this framework, Bermuda's heritage tourism landscape perpetuates an institutionally imposed colonialist narrative that neglects to explore the contributions of the island's under-represented communities. This article explores these issues with respect to the island's tourism plan. It concludes by highlighting new archaeological research centered on the material lives of enslaved Bermudians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]