Cultures in Contact
ANT 326L (30410)
Spring, 2008
Samuel M. Wilson
Overview: Colonial Strategies and Indigenous Resistance
• Spanish stratification
• English expulsion
• French articulation
The European conquest
• significant differences in the ways the Americas were colonized
1500s
Portuguese Brazil
The "land rush" of the 16th century
• exploration, and attempts to hold lands for future development
Geography of Colonization from 1500-1700
• Santa Fe, Jamestown, and Quebec were all founded in the first decade of the 1600s.
Three patterns of colonization
• replaced indigenous hierarchy
• created a town-oriented, land-based, multiethnic, stratified society
• depended on indigenous labor
2. Expulsion
• Isolation and buffer zones between populations
• mono-ethnic
• land is more important than labor or other resources
3. Articulation
• cooperation is needed
• resources more important than land
• integration, because of complementary economic relationship
Colonial Types
• Less to do with “National Character” than with what resources were being sought
• But also relates to attitudes about indigenous people
Spanish Objectives
• Critical resource: labor
• First objective: metals
• Territorial expansion
The 16th Century
• Export economies
• Plantation agriculture
• New World slavery
• multiethnic societies
• cultural change
Spanish colonialism
• Economy was a hybrid combination of European and Indigenous foods
• Fundamentally different society, not a European transplant
The institutions of Spanish conquest
• Encomienda
• Repartamiento
• Entradas
• Mission & Presidio, schools
Early entradas
• Cortés
• Pizarro
• De Soto
• Coronado
Spanish Colonial World
" If the great symbol of the English colonist is the frontiersman clearing the land, the symbol of the Spanish colonization should be the adelantado pacing out the grids of a Spanish town."
Three patterns of colonization
• replaced indigenous hierarchy
• created a town-oriented, land-based, multiethnic, stratified society
• depended on indigenous labor
The Emerging English Strategy
• Adopted plantation cash-cropping strategy
• Tended not to interact with Indigenous people, but enslaved Africans
• Fought territorial wars with Europeans and Native people
English areas
The early English settlements on the Eastern seaboard
• Nearly a disaster...
• Roanoak, 1585
• Jamestown 1607
• role of chance
English Objectives
• The critical resource was land
• Eastern Seaboard
• Caribbean
Jamestown
Martin’s Hundred
Martin’s Hundred, site A
How English Colonization was organized
• The Virginia Company
• lasted 1606-1624
• a for-profit venture
• collapse came from high mortality, bad relations with indigenous people, and
unprofitability
Trade
[The Virginia Indians are] covetous of Copper, Beads, and such like trash. …They adorne themselves most with copper beads and paintings…In each eare commonly they have 3 great holes, whereat they hang chaines, bracelets, or copper. John Smith
French Colonial Strategies
Other European powers...
1540, Hans Holbein the Younger