Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Trace Element Analysis as a Guide to Exchange

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Danielle L. Dadiego, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, will undertake research to study the effectiveness of Spanish economic institutions in a borderland region. Recent studies have illuminated the diverse actions that native groups enacted in response to Spanish colonialism ranging from allying with the Spanish for military support to cleaving out a wedge in the market economy. Current work has considered issues of transculturation, indigenous agency, persistence, and autonomy; however, these examinations focus on the scale of the household or local economy, and neither place native agents within a larger economic network, nor do they consider the agency of Spanish and other European actors in the context of a colonial economy. Colonial Pensacola, Florida provides an ideal stage to examine how monolithic trade policies intersect with economic reality, but this context is not unique. All over the world, past and present, individuals, groups, and institutions innovate and improvise within and against the global market and national trade policies. Understanding how this process played out in the past can lead to a better understanding of how people in local contexts navigate their daily lives within a globally connected economy. Danielle L. Dadiego combines archival research, traditional artifact analysis, and chemical composition and isotopic analysis of glass beads and lead shot using Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and acid dissolution to study the role that both colonial and native people played in disrupting or contributing to colonial economic institutions. Glass beads are ubiquitous on colonial period sites, common trade items for Europeans, and, most importantly, socially charged items within native thought-worlds. Lead shot is equally ubiquitous; however, it is considered a mundanely functional item. Although broadly recovered from sites, lead shot and monochrome glass beads lack diagnostic physical or stylistic characteristics that would facilitate interpretations of production, distribution, and use patterns. Innovations in methodological techniques, including LA-ICP-MS, allow the use of formerly ignored artifact categories to trace the distribution of goods across the landscape. These chemical methods are used in conjunction with a close examination of historical documents to provide evidence of how goods moved through colonial and indigenous communities, foregrounding the importance of economic agency among settlers and natives, even when these practices challenged idealized models of mercantilism and colonial government regulations. The combination of the datasets described above will provide evidence of how the Spanish reacted or interacted with indigenous exchange systems that were considered illicit based on Spanish trade regulations. Traditional archaeological approaches have equated the Spanish economic system as a dominant force in the colonial economy of Florida, as well as subsumed local or economic agency as illicit or informal. Moreover, determining chemical recipes and identifying compositional groups to illuminate economical choices people made during colonization is a new approach that only just begun to gain momentum. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.