Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in Early Colonial El Salvador

Abstract

In this chapter we explore the material encounters and indigenous transformations that took place in two different times and places in the Central American Republic of El Salvador, which in the early colonial period formed part of the audiencia of Guatemala. The cases consist of (1) the early Spanish colonial villa (town) of San Salvador – now the archaeological site of Ciudad Vieja – during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and (2) the indigenous Pipil town of Caluco of the Izalcos region in western El Salvador during the second half of the same century. The two cases together cover a time span from about ad 1525 to 1600. Any archaeological study of sixteenth-century Spanish America should confront the “haunts” of modernity enumerated by Charles Orser (1996, 2004, 2014): colonialism, mercantilism/capitalism, Eurocentrism, and racialization. These are structurally complex, interconnected forces or metaprocesses that operate on a global scale through simultaneous vertical and horizontal networks as a “unified ... system of activity, practice, and procedure” that came into existence after ad 1500 (Orser 2014, 27). While the haunts are massive global forces that change through time, we may address them in specific archaeological cases by contextualizing issues of power (e.g., gender, status, ethnicity, and identity) through material culture studies at the local, regional, and global scale and in varying time spans. The scale at which pattern can be comprehended or meaning attributed is referred to as the “effective scale” (Marquardt 1989, 7; 1992, 107; following Crumley 1979, 166). We view these issues from the perspective of the effective scales (segments of space and time) in multiscalar, dialectical analysis of archaeological landscapes and material culture (Marquardt 1989, 1992; Orser 1996, 184–190; 2014, 2–4, 66–69). Considering the nexus of everyday practice as seen through a multiscalar, dialectical analysis of the materiality of interaction and change, it becomes possible to plot the courses of relationships and intersections of different groups. The issues of power came into play at the scales of the community and the household at Ciudad Vieja and Caluco as distinct social groups made efforts to preserve their own practices and traditions as they lived alongside each other