The colonisation of the Americas is one of the most brutal chapters in global history: violence committed against Indigenous inhabitants included mass enslavement, exploitation, and genocide. More subtly, this violence also took the form of European powers seizing control over the narrative of what happened. In doing so, colonisers tried to wrench control away from Indigenous peoples over their own past and identities. As a result, representation of Indigenous Americans in Western mainstream history has long been defined (and confined) by the Western perspective.
Indigenous Caribbean peoples were depicted as simple-minded ‘primitives’ or bloodthirsty cannibals, depending on (a) how hostile they were to Spanish invaders and (b) the motives of those invaders (under 16th century Spanish law, people labelled ‘cannibals’ were allowed to be enslaved). They were also generalised as one people, “Indios”, when in reality they were a complex social network of distinct, diverse groups. The colonial narrative also claimed that Indigenous Caribbeans all ‘disappeared’ during colonisation, when in fact many elements of pre-colonial culture are still present and celebrated in many parts of the Caribbean today.
Increasingly, mainstream academia is waking up to this problem of deeply ingrained ‘colonial narratives’. There is a growing movement to ‘decolonise’ knowledge systems by rejecting dominant Western perspectives, and embracing ‘alternative’ tellings of the past. This movement is very relevant for studying the early colonial Caribbean, as this was the first place that colonial entanglements erupted.
Archaeology is an important tool in this process of ‘decolonising’ history. Archaeology opens windows to the past in a way that gives an alternative view to the one we see through (colonial) historical texts. This means we get a more complete picture of past peoples, interactions, and events.
Archaeological work at La Vega is an example of this: it is highlighting the complex nature of early colonial interactions and identity-expressions on Hispaniola. Analysis of pottery from La Vega has revealed the strong ‘intercultural’ dynamics operating in the town between Indigenous, African, and European residents.
Applying a decolonial approach to the material pushes us to rethink boundaries between ‘Indigenous’ vs. ‘colonial’ spaces. It recognises that identities were tangled together: ideas, knowledge, and practices flowed between different groups in complicated and energetic ways.
La Vega has been incredibly important in deepening our understanding of colonial social realities. Through archaeology, we are discovering more and more about groups that are underrepresented in written history: namely, African and Indigenous peoples.
However, excavating only in colonial town sites (like La Vega) itself maintains a colonial-era mindset: it makes European activity the focus of research, rather than local Indigenous life. For this reason, more and more archaeological projects are turning their attention to Indigenous sites on Hispaniola, both in the colonial period and before it. This is an important step in trying to gain a more balanced view of the past.
Text by Rosa Mason, based on original published research (see further reading).
Photo: Indigenous family of La Caridad de los Indios village in the region of Yateras, Guantánamo province, Cuba (photo by Caroline Glasius-Nyborg).
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.
Hofman, C.L, J.U. Hung, E. Malatesta, J. Jean, T. Sonnemann, and M. Hoogland, 2018. Indigenous Caribbean perspectives: Archaeologies and legacies of the first colonised region in the New World. Antiquity 92(361), 200-216.
Hofman, C.L, and F. Keehnen, 2019. Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas : Archaeological Case Studies (The early Americas: history and culture, volume 9). Leiden; Boston: Brill.
Hofman, C.L., R. Valcárcel Rojas, and J.U. Hung, 2020. Colonization, Transformations, and Indigenous Cultural Persistence in the Caribbean, in C. Beaule and J. Douglas (eds), The Caribbean Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 55-82.
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).
Ting, C., J.U. Hung, C.L. Hofman, and P. Degryse, 2018. Indigenous technologies and the production of early colonial ceramics in Dominican Republic. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 17, 47-57.