Rancherías: Historical Archaeology of Early Colonial Campsites on Margarita and Coche Islands, Venezuela

Abstract

The frantic nature of the contact period followed by the unrelenting forging of quotidian colonial realities brought dramatic changes to indigenous peoples across the Americas. Each of these phases assumed specific social expressions and pulsated with diverse regional tempos. Undeniably, some threads that interconnected indigenous populations of the late precolonial times were irreversibly severed during the contact period. Other links survived and underwent various processes of transformation. Along the Venezuelan coast and the parallel chain of Southeastern Caribbean islands, the arrival of the Europeans had categorical consequences. It cut off or thoroughly transformed traditional circuits of exchange and spheres of interaction which crossed boundaries of archaeologically defined precolonial cultures and united diverse – protohistorically known – linguistic and ethnic units (Amodio 1991; Antczak and Antczak 2006; Biord Castillo 1985; Biord Castillo and Arvelo 2007; Heinen and García-Castro 2000; Henley 1985; Perera 2000; Scaramelli and Tarble de Scaramelli 2005; Tiapa 2008). Although little is known about the nature of the social processes behind the scene, there is some persuasive archaeological evidence of their operation in the late precolonial and early colonial Venezuelan Caribbean (Antczak and Antczak 2015a, 2015b; Antczak et al. 2015; Rivas 2001). Northeastern Venezuela is exceptionally well-suited for archaeological research into the encounter of differing material cultures and socio-cultural transformations in early colonial settings. Since the early sixteenth century, the Spanish were present in this area on the barren island of Cubagua surrounded by extensive pearl oyster beds. There, the town of Nueva Cádiz was officially founded in 1528. Ever since then, facts and fictions about this town and its inhabitants have played an important role in Venezuelan historiography and anthropology; they have also stirred the imagination of artists. The ‘story’