Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Colonial Campeche: History and Archaeology

Abstract

In 1540, 30 Spanish conquistadors founded the municipality of Campeche as part of the Spanish Crown’s colonization of the Yucatán Peninsula. In 2000, a team of multinational, multidisciplinary researchers excavated the recently discovered church and associated cemetery that ministered to the residents of Campeche from its founding until the early seventeenth century. This edited volume details those excavations and the results of the ensuing decade of analysis. Written for a broad scholarly audience, the volume eloquently presents and examines a wealth of new data about life, death, and the complexity of social relationships in early colonial Campeche.Each chapter offers a different analytical approach to the study of the church and cemetery. Some of the contributors mine archival sources for historical data about the lives of those living in colonial Campeche. Others seek similar information by examining the excavated skeletons for evidence of disease and stress markers, oral pathologies, and body modifications. Still others perform strontium isotope analysis to determine the buried individuals’ places of origin, and carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to determine their diets. Perhaps the most surprising and significant find was that the graveyard included individuals of European, indigenous, and African descent, and that their burials were not in any way differentiated or segregated. Rather, all individuals who lived in early colonial Campeche, regardless of descent, were buried in the same manner in the same unpartitioned graveyard.Such a discovery is notable for at least two reasons. First, it confirms that Africans were present in colonial Campeche from its very founding. Historical documents from colonial Yucatán are often silent on the subject of Africans. As Matthew Restall (p. 195) notes, “enslaved Africans were perceived as property and thus no more worthy of mention than the horses and carriages of the Spanish elite . . . . But, like horses and [carriages], Africans were needed, they were ubiquitous, and they were taken for granted.” The skeletons from the Campeche cemetery substantiate this statement and provide strong physical evidence of the presence of Africans in the Yucatán Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Second, the existence of a multiethnic, unsegregated cemetery provides new insights into the complex nature of social relationships in early colonial Yucatán. The existence of such a cemetery is surprising, given that individuals of various descent were treated so inequitably in life. The exact implications of their seemingly equitable treatment in death, however, remain uncertain and open to debate. One strength of the volume is that different contributors offer different interpretations of the same data. Some take the existence of an unsegregated cemetery as evidence of a “lack of social hierarchy among the dead buried [there]” (p. 80). Others suggest that, for the individuals of African and indigenous descent, “their location in death symbolized their location in life, adjacent to Spaniards in roles of attached subordination” (p. 197). Rather than proposing a single set of answers about the graveyard, the volume offers multiple interpretations and allows the reader to draw her or his own conclusions.These debates about the meanings and implications of the cemetery underscore the effectiveness of combining historical and archaeological data and indeed could not take place without doing so. As the volume editors note, historical and archaeological evidence can complement, verify, and contradict each other. Documents provide substantial contextual information about material remains, and material remains provide important information about individuals who did not commonly write documents and who were not commonly mentioned in them. Consequently, the multidisciplinary approach adopted in the volume allows for a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the past.The goals of the volume are at least threefold: to add complexity and nuance to discussions of early colonial life in Latin America; to provide a more inclusive view of the past by exploring the contributions of colonial Yucatán’s African and indigenous residents; and to emphasize the often overlooked role of Africans in the creation of modern identity in Campeche. Each of these goals is laudable and the authors achieve them with skill and grace. The volume further serves as a model of how effectively to combine historical and archaeological data to gain a more complete and sophisticated understanding of the past. Overall, the contributors raise more questions than they answer, and scholars should look forward to the discussions and debates that the volume will hopefully engender.