The archaeology of the Spanish Colonial experience in South America

Abstract

Reluctant as one is to admit it, the 12,000 years of North America’s past prior to Columbus are still regarded as irrelevant to mainstream American history. BRIANF AGAN( 1990: 33)IntroductionBrian Fagan’s declaration about the ‘clash of cultures’ applies to contemporary Mesoamericans and South Americans as it does to North Americans. We have passed beyond the age of the ‘Black Legend’, perhaps not entirely, but enough to regard the ‘Columbian exchange’ (Crosby 1973) as a massive confrontation of peoples, the emotional reverberations of which have not entirely disappeared, but whose effects a few of us can measure with scientific objectivity.