Treating ‘Trifles’: the Indigenous Adoption of European Material Goods in Early Colonial Hispaniola (1492–1550)

Abstract

Early colonial encounters with Europeans introduced indigenous Caribbean peoples to a wide array of foreign goods and materials. Through gift-giving and exchange, objects form vital elements for negotiating the social, cultural, and material boundaries between peoples with vastly different cultural-historical backgrounds (e.g., Cipolla 2017; Gosden 2004; Maran and Stockhammer 2012; Thomas 1991). In the Caribbean, these exotic items often possessed qualities similar to or commensurable with the preexisting values of indigenous societies, facilitating their intercultural transfer and adoption (Keehnen 2011, 2012; Oliver 2000; Saunders 1999). The blending of new and traditional material expressions ushered in a period of creativity and innovation, in which the material culture repertoires of all those involved in the colonial process increasingly transformed. European trade goods were offered to indigenous Caribbean peoples within days after first encounter on 12 October 1492 at the island of San Salvador, The Bahamas (Dunn and Kelley 1989, 83–85; see also Berman and Gnivecki this volume). Christopher Columbus’ log of his first voyage in addition to the accounts from traveling companions and other contemporaries vividly describe how such material interactions continued throughout the early colonial period. An analysis of a standard corpus of late fifteenthand early sixteenth-century (ethno)historical sources pertaining to the Greater Antilles and Bahamas has identified a total number of 177 such (reciprocal) gift-giving, barter, and tribute events in which objects transfer between cultural groups (Keehnen and Mol 2018). The vast majority of these transactions took place within the first 5-year period of colonial interaction and these involved at least 137 different types of objects, 61 of which are of European origin.2