Breaking and Making Identities: Transformations of Ceramic Repertoires in Early Colonial Hispaniola

Abstract

The first interactions between Spaniards and the peoples of the New World on the island of Hispaniola (presently Haiti and the Dominican Republic) set the stage for the course of colonization in the rest of the Americas (Hofman et al. 2018). Outcomes of the first encounters included miscommunication, misunderstanding, conflict, enslavement, and a range of other intercultural interactions. Intermarriages between Spanish men and Amerindian women, slavery, the taking of concubines, as well as exchange of goods and food items occurred on a regular basis (Deagan 1988, 2004; Sauer 1966; Valcárcel Rojas et al. 2013). These exchanges resulted in a process of transculturation;1 a creative, ongoing, process of appropriation, revision, and survival both in social and material dimensions (Ortiz [1940] 1995). Transculturation did not only occur between the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola and the Spanish. In 1503, the Spanish obtained legal justification to move indigenous peoples across the islands. Indigenous slavery was thereby officially sanctioned by the Crown ( Anderson-Córdova 1990, 2017; Hofman et al. 2018; Rivera-Pagán 2003). One of the destinations of these indigenous enslaved laborers was Hispaniola ( Anderson-Cordova 1990; Rivera-Pagán 2003; Sued Badillo 2001). By 1505, enslaved Amerindians were supplemented by enslaved Africans (Rivera-Pagán 2003; Olsen Bogaert et al. 2011a). Through time, increasingly more Africans