Conclusions

The chapter outlines some key conclusions apparent from the collection of case studies in this edited volume, particularly regarding the highly variable, and sometimes minimal, impact of processes of colonialism on local or indigenous cultures. The argument briefly revisits other chapters’ conclusions about fluidity and variability in cross-cultural interaction. It ties this varability to modern conceptions of continuity and cultural change in ongoing struggles to reckon with the lasting impact of colonialism in modern nation states. And the chapter seeks to problematize archaeologists’ conceptual frameworks that employ key terms and data from prehistoric and historic, Western and non-Western case studies of colonialism. In doing so, it aims to extend the critique of archaeologies of colonialism beyond the regions, time periods, and cultural case studies included in this book.

Population Migrations, Colonization, and Social Changes in the Late Prehistoric Lower Yangtze River

This chapter presents a case study that challenges commonly used approaches in Chinese archaeology to population migration, diffusion, colonization, and material culture change. The dramatic decline of the Liangzhu culture in the Lower Yangtze River Delta around 2000 BC has been extensively investigated. Environmental disasters such as rising sea-level and flooding were suggested by some as the main factors, while others highlighted internal social conflicts or the exhaustive use of jades as the responsible forces. This chapter instead argues that the decline of Liangzhu culture was a dynamic process in which waves of population migrations from the Guangfulin culture in the north was the primary cause. These migrants were organized colonizers who were forced to expand southward by violent conflicts in the Central Plain. Archaeological data suggest the Guangfulin conquered the Liangzhu land and restructured the cultural landscape of the Lower Yangtze River Delta.

Negotiating Colonialism on the Southern Frontier of Spanish Yucatán

This chapter describes Colonial Period (A.D. 1546-1750) and Early Mexican Republic Period (A.D. 1750-1847) settlement patterns as a product of individual negotiations. Data come from the Spanish colonization of the Maya in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Investigations in Beneficios Altos, at the southern extent of Spanish administrative control, suggests that colonialism was negotiated between individual agents seeking to maximize their personal, family, and communal circumstances. Sometimes those agents to act in the interests of the Spanish (clearly laid out, regulated, and disseminated in the form of administrative policies and hierarchies). At other times agents resisted hegemonic pressure. The results of these negotiations are explored through settlement patterns and the documentary record of Beneficios Altos in this remote frontier region with its notoriously porous border. The negotiation strategy is traced into the Republic Period, after independence from Spanish colonialism.

Challenging the Frontiers of Colonialism

The introductory chapter argues that the archaeology of colonialism is hindered by scholars’ tendencies to avoid drawing on research that crosses two specific intra-disciplinary divides. The first is the frontier between historic and prehistoric archaeology. The second frontier is between cases of colonialism or political aggression initiated by European historical powers during the Age of Exploration and non-Western polities. Drawing also on relevant research from history and Classics, it offers a set of working definitions for key terms. This theoretical introduction offers the volume’s readers a new, productive approach to colonialism and imperialism by highlighting recent research in four areas of scholarship: prehistoric Western, historic Western, prehistoric non-Western, and historic non-Western case studies. It argues that theoretical foci such as community-level reorganization, social adaptations to epidemic disease, or ideological creolization are far more fruitful than adhering to a historically arbitrary tendency to avoid crossing disciplnary frontiers.

This Land Is My Land

Ethnohistoric and archaeological data are used to explore frontier dynamics in the Late Postclassic conquest of the Chontal people of Oztuma by the Aztecs, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Long situated as a frontier between the Aztec and Tarascan empires, the province of Oztuma provides a unique opportunity to challenge interpretations of Prehispanic colonialism by evaluating archaeological and ethnohistorical data concerning those indigenous to the province as well as those who arrived and settled as agents of the Aztec Empire. These data illustrates that the boundary between the Aztec and Tarascan Empires was shaped not only by imperial design and strategic necessity, but by a complex frontier dynamic in which conquered peoples were neither passive nor subdued. When opportunity appeared in the form of the destruction of the Aztec central government, local peoples contested the legitimacy of rule by the Nahuatl-speaking colonists.

Using a Graphic Model to Explore the Range of Cross-Cultural Interaction in Ancient Borderlands

In order to illuminate the complexities of culture contact in colonial settings it is not enough to simply shift one’s research onto the periphery, instead it is imperative that these peripheral areas are also viewed as interaction zones in their own right. This chapter presents a graphic model for representing a range of cross-cultural interaction designed specifically to address archaeologists’ challenges of conceptualizing several types of cross-cultural interaction in the cultural and geographic borderlands at the frontiers of the influence sphere of expansive states or colonial powers. The model’s design allows for the numerous simultaneous levels of interaction, which reflects the intricate nature of cultural contacts, and which considers indigenous perspectives in tandem with colonial aspirations. The model’s utility is illustrated through research from the early Middle Horizon (ca. A.D. 550–800) in the Moquegua Valley, Peru, a borderland between the Wari and Tiwanaku States.

“Is This Like the Nile that Riseth Up?”

This chapter uses data from Tell Timai, Egypt to examine political dymanics in a Greco-Roman Egyptian city (Thmuis) in Late Antiquity, focusing on the Greek period of rule in Egypt and the influence of Hellenism from Alexander’s conquest of Egypt (332 B.C.E.) to the death of Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic pharaoh (30 B.C.E.). The succeeding Ptolemaic dynasty strove to establish legitimacy through what Hellenization of the Egyptians, or Egyptization of the Greeks, generating new hybrid icons and deities. Yet as Ptolemy V took the throne, rebellion consumed Egypt. This Classical archaeology study offers insights into the dynamic processes of colonization and imperialism in a realm that was a crucible for Western ideology. Excavation data from north Timai reveal the violence of Hellenistic

Power and Resilience

The old town (Pinagbayanan) of San Juan in Batangas, Philippines was established along the coast of Tayabas Bay in the 1840s during the late Spanish Colonial Period. Popular history recounts its relocation 7 km inland to its current location in 1890 because of seasonal flooding. Geoarchaeological landscape data from two stone houses and the old church complex are used alongside ethnohistorical accounts to explore this period further. Archival documents document the conflict between the priest and the residents in transferring the town. By integrating these data, this chapter explores the power of the church and resilience of the townspeople. This argument analyzes how two prominent groups responded to the same flooding event in the context of local resilience and resistance to Spanish demands. The results are tied to the larger context of Spanish colonial occupation of the Philippines.

Images of Evangelization and Archipelagos of Spanish Colonialism in Latin America and the Philippines

This chapter uses a small set of religious artifacts to support a broad comparative argument about the impact of Catholic evangelization efforts (and colonialism more generally) on indigenous cultures in the southern Andes and Philippines. A set of religious images used as evangelical tools of conversion by diasporas of Spanish Catholic missionaries from both regions are used to document variability in ways that Spanish culture infiltrated indigenous ideologies. Differences in sociopolitical complexity and population densities are the reasons why religious art and architecture show different levels of transculturation in the two regions. Indigenous imagery permeates Andean religious Colonial Period art and architecture, while it is virtually absent from the Philippine examples. This variability is also the basis for reconceptualizing the Spanish empire as an archipelago of islands of colonial influence in a broader geopolitical landscape claimed by an imperial power.

Contextualizing the Chinook at Contact

Employing an indigenous-centered perspective, this chapter explores the impact of material objects recovered from houses, hearths, and camp facilities received by the Chinook (at the mouth of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest of North America) as gifts, purchased, used, modified, repaired and discarded. These materials come from the Middle Village (qí’qayaqilxam) component of the Station Camp/McGowan site (45PC106), a traditional summer village occupied recurrently by hunter-gatherer-fishers during the early fur-trade period (ca. A.D. 1788-1825). The manner in which new forms of capital, like glass trade beads, muskets, European and Chinese ceramics, copper and iron goods, and glass bottles, were integrated into Chinook economic and political systems is important in the study of colonialism and culture contact. Combined with ethnographic and ethnohistorical data, their use is contextualized within dramatic social and demographic changes in Chinook culture as it intersected with British and American commercial trade.