Archaeology of Colonialism
Convenors
Claire L. Lyons and Richard W. Lindstrom (Getty Research Institute).
This Symposium has been made possible through the generosity of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities
This symposium will explore the archaeological evidence of colonialism through case studies of material culture and excavated sites. The case studies range from ancient Mesopotamia and the classical Mediterranean to historical contexts in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Cross-cultural and diachronic studies can offer valuable ways of integrating–or problematizing the relationship between–artifactual remains and historic documentation. Each paper adopts a comparative approach and considers issues of identity, cultural reciprocity, and indigenous responses to the colonial experience within an explicit theoretical framework.
The full-day symposium will be organized into morning and afternoon sections, each with a respondent and discussion period. The first session focuses on interpretations of material culture evidence in order to explore the role of economic and cultural exchange in defining aspects of colonization. Taking the evidence of recent excavations, the four papers present different paradigms of colonial trade and how exchanges between colonizers and colonized are organized. Stein’s paper on the Uruk settlement at 4th-millennium Hacinebi (Turkey) suggests that colonialism need not imply economic or cultural dominance over the host community, and interprets the extensive physical data using trade-diaspora models drawn from West African ethnography. By contrast, Dominguez’s consideration of the Greek influence on Iberian art and language suggests that colonial cultural identity was asserted without the presence of substantial settlements of foreign colonists. Kelly’s presentation highlights the West African Hueda and Dahomey states which acted strategically to control the trade in European products and slaves, an instance of indigenous autonomy not frequently encountered in other African colonial contexts. Autonomy and agency are emphasized in several papers, while van Dommelen applies post-colonial ideas of ambivalence and ambiguity to an assessment of Punic and Roman Sardinia, in order to challenge conventional colonial terminology.
The role of myth, religion, and ritual in the symbolic expression of colonial identities is examined in the afternoon session. These papers consider shifting identities in response to colonial contact and their reflection in the patterning of the material world. Cummins discusses the dominant Christian missionizing influence on local patterns of marriage and the social order, through analysis of 16th-century Andean town planning and architecture. In Oceania, Thomas analyzes the impact of colonially introduced styles of textiles and dress, which are in turn transformed by the local inhabitants and come to objectify new forms of Christian sociality. Samford proposes a case of religious continuity in the practice of ancestor veneration among 18th-century Virginia Tidewater slave communities, and parallels the use of shrine-pits with similar rituals in West Africa. While defining “self vs. other” may have functioned to maintain ethnic identity in the context of plantation labor, the example of Greek-Etruscan interaction in Southern Italy described by Malkin questions such a clear dichotomy. He points to the emergence of collective identities and mediating cultures through the adoption of myths of “ancestor-founders” on the part of the colonized. Malkin’s use of “Middle Ground” theory, developed in the context of Great Lakes frontier cultures, echoes van Dommelen’s emphasis on ambiguity at the end of the first session.
papers:
Author 1 Author 2 Title
Cummins Forms of Andean colonial Towns, free will and marriage
Dominquez Greeks in Iberia: Colonialism without Colonisation
Kelly Indigenous responses to colonial encounters on the west African coast: Hueda and dahomey from the 17th through 19th Century
MacCormack Respondent
Malkin A Colonial Middle Ground: Greek, Etruscan, and Local Elites in the bay of Naples
Papadopoulos Closing Remarks
Samford “Strong is the Bond of Kinship:” West African-Style Ancestor Shrines and Subfloor Pits on African-American Quarter
Schire Respondent
Stein Colonies without Colonialism: models of Mesopotamian- Anatolian Interaction at Hacinebi, Turkey
Thomas Colonizing Cloth: Interpreting the Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Oceania
van Dommelen Ambiguous Matters: identity and local cultures in Punic/Roman Sardinia