Bolts of Cloth and Sherds of Pottery

Impressions of Caste in the Material Culture of the Seventeenth Century Audiencia of Quito

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8874009
AutoresRoss W Jamieson (0000-0001-9125-9373, Simon Fraser University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2004
Volumen60
Número3
Páginas431-446
Fecha de publicación2004-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-1615 • E-ISSN: 1533-6247
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/tam.2004.0016
OpenAlexW1977306622
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14
Referencias citadas45

People use domestic material culture to create an image of themselves that they project to others who live in, or visit, their homes. This was as true in the Spanish colonial city as it is in any city today. If, therefore, we wish to investigate status and ethnicity in the Spanish colonies, domestic material culture is an excellent source of information on how people imagined their own place, and that of others, in society. The first step toward this is the reconstruction of the material culture of urban colonial houses. There are two main bodies of evidence available to accomplish this. The first is descriptions of household goods in the notarial archives of the colonies, and the second is the physical remains of household refuse found in archaeological contexts in cities. Each body of evidence can make unique contributions to our understanding of social relations in the colonial city, but each also has unique limitations. I use the interplay between colonial notarial documents and archaeological remains to help define the role of material culture in the study of caste relations in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Spanish colonial régimen de castas was a system that categorized people by caste, using a complex mixture of legal status, ethnicity, racial (or physical) categorization, and economic roles

Archaeology · Caste · Categorization · Colonialism · Ethnic culture · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Pottery · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Law