Introduction: Towards a material history of Colonial Latin America

Abstract

Colonial historians of Latin American have made specific and sustained turns to the material, the environmental, and the animal over the last three decades (e.g. Candiani 2014; Few and Tortorici 2013; Thurner and Pimentel 2021). Latin American historical archaeology—with its attention to these same domains—also came of age during this same period, with a genuine explosion in research on the colonial period over the past several decades in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Andes, the Cono Sur, and Brazil (e.g. Fernández Dávila and Gómez Serafín 1998; Funari and Senatore 2015; VanValkenburgh et al. 2016; Van Buren 2010). Enduring questions concerning subalternity, literacy, and the active suppression of historical voices and material traces remain central to how we understand the region’s colonial history, questions that have challenged many to seek out alternative (and indeed non-textual) archives. And yet—despite persistent calls for interdisciplinary exchange—the past few decades of research on colonial Latin America have also often been characterized by a lack of sustained engagement and dialog across many of the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Much of the new work in Latin American historical archaeology has tended to proceed without clear and sustained engagements with contemporary research in neighboring historical fields (partly as a result of the persistent emphasis on precolonial periods in university curricula). At the same time, colonial historians in the region making the turns to materials, animals, and the environment often remain unaware of parallel research in archaeology and material culture studies, running risks of reinventing the wheel or at least missing key opportunities for knowledge sharing. There are, of course, exceptions that point towards more promising modes of reading, research, and collaboration. One example that stands out in this respect is the nexus of recent scholarship surrounding the early colonial project of Indigenous resettlement in the central Andes (reducciones de indios) that began in the late sixteenth century, with archaeologists (Quilter 2010; VanValkenburgh 2021; Wernke 2007) and historians (Mumford 2012; Saito and Rosas Lauro 2017) entering into a productive dialog that runs counter to wider tendencies of mutual ignorance. Notably, this research builds upon even wider disciplinary foundations, exploring questions previously posed by historical geographers (Gade and Escobar 1982) and art historians (Cummins 2002) concerning the material processes and legacies of sixteenth-century resettlement in the