María Ximena Senatore

Sealer's sledge excavated on Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands

Details are provided of a sledge, possibly of late nineteenth/early twentieth century provenance, discovered on Byers Peninsula, Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands, in 2007.

To Project an Order: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Spatial Construction in the Spanish Colony of Floridablanca (Patagonia, Eighteenth Century)

The interpretation of the meanings of constructed space plays an important role in understanding how a certain society might have been structured in the past. this paper presents the colony of Floridablanca (Patagonia, 18th century) and examines how the different discourse levels are articulated in the construction of the colony’s spaces according to the ideal model of a social order based on the principles of the Spanish Enlightenment. The focus is on the convergence and divergence between the material world and the narratives referring to such spaces created during the existence of the colony. This approach, developed by an interdisciplinary team, involved the inclusion and interpretation of historical, archaeological, and geophysical data. Studied along three lines of evidence, the narrative analyses and material construction show how the discourse on the social organization of Floridablanca articulates convergence and divergence from these planes in different ways for different sectors of the colony.

Tierra de nadie: Arqueología, lugar y paisaje en Antártida

In this paper we discuss some of the ways in which certain areas of the Antarctic continent intended to be transformed into a series of ‘places’ not only known but also dominated by the modern world. With that aim in mind, we consider the materiality of the cultural landscape, making reference to the multiple practices that could have shaped it. We focus our attention on the first human settlements on the South Shetland Islands, which were established by sealers and whalers at the early nineteenth century.

Introduction: Disrupting the Grand Narrative of Spanish and Portuguese Colonialism

The volume contributes to disrupt the old grand narrative of cultural contact and colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America in a wide and complete sense. This edited volume aims at exploring contact archaeology in the modern era. Archaeology has been exploring the interaction of peoples and cultures from early times, but only in the last few decades have cultural contact and material world been recognized as crucial elements to understanding colonialism and the emergence of modernity. Modern colonialism studies pose questions in need of broader answers. This volume explores these answers in Spanish and Portuguese America, comprising present-day Latin America and formerly Spanish territories now part of the United States. Cultural contact studies offer a particularly in-depth picture of the uniqueness of Latin America in terms of its cultural mixture. This volume particularly highlights local histories, revealing novelty, diversity, and creativity in the conformation of the new colonial realities, as well as presenting Latin America as a multicultural arena, with astonishing heterogeneity in thoughts, experiences, practices, and, material worlds.

Modernity at the Edges of the Spanish Enlightenment. Novelty and Material Culture in Floridablanca Colony (Patagonia, Eighteenth Century)

The Nueva Colonia y Fuerte de Floridablanca was established by the Spanish Crown at the time of Charles III as part of a project of colonization of the Patagonian Atlantic coast. It was a social experiment by the eighteenth century Spanish Enlightenment where reason, order, and utopic thought all shared an outstanding role. It was created from tabula rasa on a distant and marginal area without any previous colonial occupations, drawing the edges of the modern world. The term modern refers to an Age presenting a strong relationship to the past as well as appearing as the result of a transition from the old to the new. Modernity is neither spatially nor temporally homogeneous, but implies a new relationship past-present. The idea of “novelty” is in this way central to the definition of modernity. In this chapter I am interested in exploring novelty as part of different choices and decisions made by individuals in everyday life in Floridablanca. That is linked to how individuals used material culture to negotiate new identities. The acquisition of new objects derived from consumption practices, together with the incorporation of unfamiliar or unknown objects as well as the keeping and exhibition of certain personal items were evaluated.