La Concepción de La Vega Real (a.k.a. ‘La Vega’) was one of the first Spanish towns founded in the colonised Americas. As an early colonial settlement, it was the setting for a diverse and complex web of interactions between Spanish colonisers, Indigenous peoples, and African enslaved people. Archaeological work at the site since the late 19th-century has shaped our understanding of these early interactions, giving fascinating insight into how these different groups of people lived alongside each other, learnt from one another, and even adopted parts of each other’s cultures. Archaeology at La Vega has enabled a more complete telling of the site’s history than we find in Spanish colonial documents, shedding light on the reality of this early ‘intercultural contact’.
Map of Hispaniola (Map by Eduardo Herrera Malatesta; in Ernst and Hofman 2019, 125).
In 1494, Christopher Columbus built a fort in the Cibao Valley of Hispaniola (modern-day Dominican Republic). This fort was designed to help search for and control the Valley’s rich gold mines. However, the area was home to the local Indigenous leader Guarionex and his community, who began resisting Columbus’ activities as time went on. This led to conflict, and the original fort was abandoned by the Spanish. In 1498 a new fort was built on the site we now call La Vega, and it grew into a wealthy gold-mining “boom town”. Many of La Vega’s diverse inhabitants worked in the gold-mining industry, as well as in sugar plantations and cattle herding. As well as Spanish colonists, these inhabitants included local peoples, Indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean (who had been enslaved and forcibly relocated to Hispaniola), and people of African descent ‘imported’ from Africa and Spain.
La Vega had a central fort, a monastery, a cistern, and residential areas. These features have been studied by various surveys and excavations from as early as 1892, and they are now protected as a National Park.
The most significant period of archaeological investigation held at La Vega was from 1976 to 1994: these years saw the the first large-scale excavations of the site, which unearthed its monumental central structures (the fort and the monastery). Archaeologists also uncovered a lot of ceramic finds that displayed a hybrid mix of styles, forms, and production techniques. These ceramic wares were labelled “Cerámica Indo-Hispano” (and are now commonly referred to as ‘Cerámica de transculturación’, or ‘transcultural ceramics’) because of their fusion of Indigenous and Spanish traits, as well as visible African influence.
In 1996, the University of Florida and the Dominican Republic’s National Parks department launched a project to study these ceramics more closely. They are perhaps La Vega’s most famous archaeological finds, because they have shed light on the complex cultural interaction and exchange occurring in this early colonial town.
Early colonial towns like La Vega were the sites of dynamic cultural connections. Ideas, knowledge, and traditions became blended and reinvented, as peoples from diverse backgrounds lived and worked alongside each other.
Many different groups of people are represented in the archaeology of La Vega. The three main cultural-racial groups were Europeans (mainly from Spain), Indigenous peoples from Hispaniola and from other parts of the circum-Caribbean, and those of African origin or descent. Race as well as gender, class, and labour relations shaped La Vega’s complex social hierarchy, which comprised a complicated system of classes, subclasses, and intercultural or ‘hybrid’ classes. This intricate class hierarchy is known primarily from written documents, but archaeological work at La Vega over the last century has played a crucial role in revealing its social reality.
Text by Rosa Mason, based on original published research (see further reading).
Deagan, K.A., 2002. La Vega cerámica Indo-Hispano—an early sixteenth century Caribbean Colono-Ware, in R. Hunter (ed), Ceramics in America. New Hampshire: Chipstone Foundation with University Press of New England, 195–198.
Ernst, M. and C.L. Hofman, 2019. Breaking and Making Identities: Transformations of Ceramic Repertoires in Early Colonial Hispaniola, in C.L. Hofman and F.W.M. Keehnen (eds), Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas. Leiden: Brill, 124-145.
Kulstad, P., 2008. Concepción de La Vega 1495-1564: A Preliminary Look at Lifeways in
the Americas’ First Boom Town. Florida (Master thesis University of Florida).
Kulstad, P., 2019. Hispaniola - hell or home? : Decolonizing grand narratives about intercultural interactions at Concepción de la Vega (1494-1564). Leiden (Ph.D. thesis University of Leiden).