The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750
Christian Feest1995, America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Karen Kupperman, ed.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Five centuries after Europe began to invent and discover America, the question of the role that American Indian artifacts played in the shaping of this New World in the European consciousness must remain largely unanswered. Although such artifacts have supplied tangible evidence for the human nature of the indigenous inhabitants of the lands across the Atlantic ever since Columbus returned from his first voyage, serious interest in their study—and in the study of their collecting—has significantly lagged behind the critical examination of other sources available for an understanding both of native America and of its European perception. This situation is itself an artifact of the history of research, and it illustrates in part the insignificant role and undeservedly minor academic status that ethnographic museums and their collections have played in anthropological and historical research. On the other hand, an understanding of the often now unique documents collected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has suffered not only because they were separated from their original cultural context and meaning, but also due to the European contexts in which they were preserved. The date of 1750, which marks the end of the period under consideration, coincides rather closely with a paradigmatic change in the collecting of non European artifacts in Europe.
Key takeaways
- Of the objects which ended up in ethnographic collections, not all received the same amount of attention.
- Sometimes, and more often in the case of scholarly collections, catalogs provided a fairly complete discussion of the objects.
- The evidence for objects from native North America in pre-1750 European collections was published more recently.
- Documentation of the transfer from the American field to the European collection or between collections within Europe 54 are not at all common.
- But such artifacts were clearly not abundant in pre-1750 collections.
Related papers
European Collecting of American Indian Artefacts
Journal of the History of Collections , 1993
During the past 500 years, European collecting of artefacts produced by the native peoples of the Americas has been affected by changes in the conceptualization of the inhabitants of the New World (from archetypal 'other' to merican Indians to specific peoples) and of their products (from potentially useful artefacts to cultural documents to 'primitive art') as well as by growing specialization of the collections. Since these changes were closely interrelated, a better understanding of their relationships is necessary for an evaluation of the various meanings attributed to these artefacts in Europe.
The Savage European: A Structural Approach to European Iconography of the American Indian
Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communications, 1975
[The Arrival of Tribal Objects in the West] From North America
Primitivism in 20th Century Art (William Rubin, ed.), 1984
Perceptions of indigenous peoples of the Americas in Europe and ethngraphic collecting, early 16th century to early 20th century
“Formations of ‘Indian’ Fantasies: European Museums and the Decontextualization of Native American Art and Artifacts”
Visual Representations of Native Americans: Transnational Contexts and Perspectives, edited by Karsten Fitz (2012), pages 179-193
European traditions and conventions of representing Native American culture are historically grounded in the development of the museum as a space of ideological fantasy, specifically focusing on representations of other cultures and peoples. This mode of exhibition—the appropriation of Native culture by European and American museums—is intrinsically linked to the formation of museums as displays of state power and privilege. A key myth or fantasy that pervades the process of collecting ‘primitive’ cultures within European and American museums is that these cultures need to be rescued from oblivion before they die off. Native or indigenous artifacts have therefore become an important part of this transnational process of collecting the world, turning cultures into collections within museums, a project that has centered upon European representations of empire. As Jordan and Haladyn argue in this chapter, the collection of Native American artifacts can be seen as a primary mode of colonization, and, hence, the museum collection functions to control Native culture through the misappropriation or theft of cultural objects from tribes: the primary results of this process involve the silencing of the context of these artifacts and the voices of Natives from their own cultural representations and traditions.
The Invention of the Colonial Americas - Preface and Introduction
The Invention of the Colonial Americas : Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781-1844, 2022
The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa.
Tracing nineteenth-century North American intellectual networks through Native objects
International Seminar : Ontologies in the Making, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), May 2022, 2022
Father Saint-Onge (1842-1901) was a secular missionary in the American West, anthropologist and museologist. By donating nearly 400 Native artifacts from across the continent to the Séminaire de Saint-Hyacinthe (Québec), he confirmed his missionary experience and his interest in the material culture of the First Peoples. My research consists of understanding the processes of collection and documentation using archaeological and anthropological artifacts as the only tangible witnesses to his undertaking. In this way, there is a constant back and forth between the collector and the objects. These artifacts, to be considered in their singularity but also as a whole where each one enters in relation with the others, become the main subjects to be questioned in order to trace the material and immaterial indices of the potential networks of the missionary. In this research, the study of indigenous objects is therefore not justified for their formal and functional aspect but for what they have to reveal about Saint-Onge's understanding of indigenous populations and their ontologies as well as the way in which he envisaged or could envisage the construction of knowledge about them. Several epistemologies overlap depending on the time period, the 19th century and the present time, and the spatio-temporal context in which we alternate, both indigenous and non-indigenous. This to bring out a vast mesh of agents, both human and non-human, that has contributed to the writing of a Western anthropology of North American indigenous communities since the 19th century.
Tokens of Their Love: Interpreting Native American Trade Goods from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York
This paper examines several small collections of Native American grave goods excavated in the late nineteenth century. When examined in conjunction with other contemporary assemblages, these seventeenth-and eighteenth-century artifacts highlight the transformation ofNative American culture during this time. Although the artifacts were recovered without the benefit of modem excavation techniques, and have only limited contextual information, they retain the potential to expand our understanding of Native American mortuary customs. Moreover, they underscore the potential of under-analyzed museum collections to provide new insights into the past.
Related topics
Related papers
Objects of Change? Revisiting Native Material Culture and Technological Traditions in the Post-1492 Americas
Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, 2021
An Appraisal of the Indigenous Acquisition of Contact-Era European Metal Objects in Southeastern North America
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2018
Investigations at two sites in southeastern North America have yielded an unanticipated abundance of European artifacts that largely date to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries CE. On other sites in the region, such objects have been documented in mortuary and special-use contexts. However, the volume and provenience of these recent finds, many of which were recovered in apparently domestic loci, are suggestive of a more secular context than is typical. These assemblages indicate that, even in the early era of Contact, Native Americans had developed a variety of ways to obtain European goods that were equally important as gifting. Despite strides that are being made in research on European commodities in Indigenous contexts, comparative studies continue to be hampered by lack of consistency in recovery techniques.
Archaeology and the First Americans
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Reviewed Work(s): Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New World by Elizabeth Scott
Journal of American Ethnic History, 2020
Perspectives on the Use of European Material Culture at Two Mid-To-Late 17th-Century Native American Sites in the Chesapeake
North American Archaeologist, 2004
This article examines the assemblages of two Contact period Native American sites: Posey (c. 1650-1700) and Camden (c. 1680-1710). While the collections from these two sites share many similarities, their analysis revealed that occupants of the Posey site had far greater proportions of European material goods than their counterparts at the Camden site. The amount of European artifacts at each site was scant at best, but Posey residents used European artifacts as commodities for trade while Camden inhabitants possessed a number of formal European tools, suggesting that they were more directly integrated into daily activities.
American Contributions to European Archaeology
Sprawozdania Archeologiczne , 2011
Moquis, Kastiilam, and the Trauma of History: Hopi Oral Traditions of Seventeenth-Century Franciscan Missionary Abuses
New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, 2017
With the Columbian Quincentenary just a few years off, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) puzzled its role in anticipating the inevitable events that would surround the 500th anniversary of European-Native American interactions. I was a member of the Executive Committee of the SAA at the time, and the president asked me spearhead the society's efforts for observing the Columbian Quincentenary. Thanks to the support and encouragement of key SAA officers Don Fowler, Prudence Rice, Bruce Smith, and Jerry Sabloff, we were able to develop a plan. After exploring a number of options with the board, we settled upon a series of topical seminars that we dubbed Columbian Consequences. These nine public seminars, to be held over a three-year span, were designed to generate an accurate and factual assessment of what did-and what did not-transpire as a result of the Columbian encounter. We specifically tasked ourselves to probe the social, demographic, ecological, ideological, and human repercussions of European-Native American encounters across the Spanish Borderlands, spreading the word among both the scholarly community and the greater public at large. Although sponsored by the SAA, the Columbian Consequences enterprise rapidly transcended the traditional scope of archaeological inquiry, drawing together a diverse assortment of personalities and perspectives. We invited leading scholars of the day to synthesize current thinking about specific geographical settings across the Spanish Borderlands, which extend from St. Augustine (Florida) to San Francisco (California). Each overview was designed to provide a Native American context, a history of European involvement, and a summary of scholarly research. The structure was fairly simple. Each of three consecutive SAA annual meetings (in 1988, 1989, and 1990) hosted three Columbian Consequences seminars. The resulting three volumes were published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, which remarkably published each volume less than a year after the seminar papers were presented. The initial book, entitled Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Thomas 1989), tackled the European-Native American interface from the Pacific Slope across the southwestern heartland to East Texas, from Russian Fort Ross to southern Baja California. The archaeologists involved addressed material culture evidence regarding contact period sociopolitics, economics, iconography, and physical environment. Other authors attempted to provide a critical balance from the perspectives of American history, Native American studies, art history, ethnohistory, and geography. In the intermediate volume-Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East (Thomas 1990)-nearly three dozen scholars pursued a similar agenda across La Florida, the greater Southeast, and the Caribbean.
“The True and Only Bones of Columbus”: Relics, Archives, and Reversed Scenarios of Discovery
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
This essay examines the ceremonies surrounding the 1877 alleged finding of Christopher Columbus's remains in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. The act of exhuming a body believed to be in Spain's possession posed a challenge for the former colonial power, which was in the process of turning Columbus into a national symbol. The Spanish government forcefully denied the legitimacy of the Dominican claim, calling it a “spectacle” contrived by the nation's religious and civil authorities. Building on Diana Taylor's theoretical framework, the essay looks at the 1877 ceremonies as social performances that facilitated the transmission of deeply rooted cultural memories. Whereas the procession of the remains from the cathedral to the church repeated the ritualized gestures prescribed for the discovery and transfer of relics, the performance enacted in the cathedral upended a different “scenario of discovery”—the one enacted by Spanish conquerors when they took possession of a n...
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.