Recent scholarship on the Indigenous Americas and European colonialism has emphasized the contested, dynamic, and locally variable character of contacts and encounters that brought together diverse peoples, epistemologies, embodied practices, and social visions. This volume adds fine-grained contributions to the conversation, focusing on archaeology and material culture from approximately 1492 to the early seventeenth century in the Caribbean and surrounding regions of Mesoamerica, Latin America, and North America. The featured studies move sharply away from older acculturation models that characterized European impacts upon Indigenous people as rapid and unidirectional, and assumed outcomes of Euro-colonial dominance and Indigenous subjugation. This newer work instead foregrounds multidirectional, transcultural forms of engagement and entanglement; the co-production of meaning; and the frequently multiple, unstable forms of significance that coalesced in sites of meeting and exchange. The sixteen essays and epilogue emphasize the creativity, intentionality, and diversity of Indigenous forms of interaction with European colonizers, particularly Spaniards. At the same time, contributors reassess the nature and consequences of severe repressions, displacements, and asymmetric exercises of power effected by Iberian colonization: slave raiding, military violence, the encomienda and reducción systems, Catholic evangelization. Methodological bases in archaeology and material culture ground these studies at highly local scales, while also being attuned to regional, hemispheric, and global processes that pervasively shaped transatlantic and circum-Caribbean developments.

An introduction lays out theoretical touchstones about these fields’ evolution, and shifting scholarly models for understanding cross-cultural relations and their material expressions. The subsequent essays, organized roughly chronologically, explore local case studies beginning with Guanahaní (San Salvador) in the Bahamas, home to Indigenous Lucayan people and site of the initial Columbian landfall. A number of generative interpretive threads emerge from the collection. Multiple authors stress that neither Indigenous nor Iberian cultures and peoples were static, homogeneous entities. The internal diversity, dynamism, and local variations among both of these groups are critical for comprehending the complexities of on-the-ground interactions and the wide variance across the hemisphere in responses to colonization. Contributors also productively disrupt analytic frames that focus strictly on direct Indigenous-colonizer relations by stressing the range of intermediaries, allies, translators, and others who shaped these contested spaces, including enslaved and free Africans.

The archaeological fieldwork and critical analyses of museum collections foregrounded in these studies pose productive counterpoints to written ethnohistorical documentation. Silences and ethnocentric biases in colonial archives can be challenged through focus on everyday as well as elite objects that have survived in situ. Simultaneously, the focus on materiality offers an opportunity to make fresh uses of documentary traces and to pose new questions about what Iberian colonizers and multilingual Indigenous scribes recorded, translated, transmitted, and preserved. Many chapters grapple with continuity and change in contact areas. In myriad locales, long-standing Indigenous cosmologies and traditions continued relatively unimpeded following initial Euro-colonial contacts.

In others, transformations occurred quickly and dramatically. Authors unpack many avenues through which Indigenous people attained European goods (including preconfigured colonial gift kits) and vice versa, then grapple with how and why such foreign items became mobilized and valued in new contexts. A number of essays scrutinize how colonizers’ ideas and expectations had to modulate as they encountered powerful Indigenous societies and new environmental conditions. While Spanish colonizers intended to establish Castilian-style cities in the Americas, for example, the realities of preexisting Indigenous landscapes and built environments, plus the extensive involvement of Indigenous people in cocreating (or actively resisting) these urbanism projects, resulted in novel forms of dwelling and laboring. Similarly, Indigenous sacred spaces did not comprehensively become stripped of meaning upon the arrival of Catholic religious authorities—Christian ideas, structures, and embodied practices became interwoven in complex ways.

Several essays point to the ongoing significance of these histories for present-day communities such as the Kalinago and Garifuna, who continue to maintain important forms of heritage and identity linked to these pasts. Further community-engaged, decolonial approaches that take up the ongoing nature of meaning production are likely possible. So too are opportunities to more fully address ethical complexities attendant to analyzing and visualizing sensitive materials, such as those associated with burials.