The Material Worlds of Colonizers in New Spain

Abstract

A combination of historical and archaeological data helps reexamine the material worlds of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico City during the sixteenth century. The historical data consist of the probate inventories of 39 Spanish colonizers, and they reveal information on the wealth of the colonizers and their personal belongings. Of the different kinds of material culture in the probate inventories, I focus only on cloth, clothing, and slaves, as well as on the wealth of colonizers. The archaeological data were obtained by the Programa de Arqueologia Urbana in the historic center of Mexico City, and they consist of houses of Spanish colonizers. These data allow us to examine two daily necessities of colonizers: food (including plants and animals) and ceramic pottery. Bringing together these two lines of data reveals the patterns of consumption of colonizers in New Spain and helps us identify different strategies that guided these patterns, including reproducing an acceptable material world modeled after life in Spain, competing in the local social hierarchy, forging relationships with local indigenous people, controlling labor and production, and domesticating a foreign world to meet the expectations of the conquest.