Bolts of Cloth and Sherds of Pottery: Impressions of Caste in the Material Culture of the Seventeenth Century Audiencia of Quito

People use domestic material culture to create an image of themselves that they project to others who live in, or visit, their homes. This was as true in the Spanish colonial city as it is in any city today. If, therefore, we wish to investigate status and ethnicity in the Spanish colonies, domestic material culture is an excellent source of information on how people imagined their own place, and that of others, in society. The first step toward this is the reconstruction of the material culture of urban colonial houses. There are two main bodies of evidence available to accomplish this. The first is descriptions of household goods in the notarial archives of the colonies, and the second is the physical remains of household refuse found in archaeological contexts in cities. Each body of evidence can make unique contributions to our understanding of social relations in the colonial city, but each also has unique limitations. ¹ I use the interplay between colonial notarial documents and archaeological remains to help define the role of material culture in the study of caste relations in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Spanish colonial régimen de castas was a system that categorized people by caste, using a complex mixture of legal status, ethnicity, racial (or physical) categorization, and economic roles.

Since at least the 1970s, archaeologists interested in the Spanish colonies have been using the physical remains of the past to understand issues of status and ethnicity. They make several assumptions in order to undertake such research. Methodologically, historical archaeologists of Spanish colonial urban sites have carried out a program of "backyard archaeology" first proposed by Charles Fairbanks, and realized at St. Augustine, Florida by Kathleen Deagan. ² Urban properties in the Spanish colonies were subdivided with walls, fences, or hedges, and a particularly important assumption of this methodology is that each household discarded its refuse in its own rear yard. This assumption allows archaeologists to tie recovered archaeological remains to a particular property. Using documents to create a history of house ownership, specific owners at specific time periods can then be associated with recovered archaeological remains.

There is, in postmodern historical and archaeological scholarship, a concern with our profound disconnection from the past. Our interpretations of social relations in the past can be problematic if based on only a single line of evidence, but the use of several independent lines of evidence, as initially put forward by R. G. Collingwood, greatly strengthens interpretations of past social relations. Historical archaeologists have the opportunity to use the "radical independence of archaeological from documentary evidence" to further strengthen this idea of independent historical sources. As Alison Wylie has argued, we can buttress our arguments about the past through building cables of evidence. Wylie has used the analogy of a cable, rather than chain, of evidence to express this idea. Evidence garnered from multiple sources provides the strands that make up the cable. For the study of caste in the colonial Andes notarial documents and archaeological excavation provide two very different, but complementary, strands to create a strong cable of evidence about social relations and material culture in the colonial Andean city. ³

There are several reasons that neither the documents nor the artifacts provide the whole picture. The first is preservation of materials in the ground. As an archaeologist sitting down to read a household inventory in a Latin American notarial archive, my first consideration is one that is almost guaranteed not to be on the mind of most historians of the Spanish colonies. It is this. How well would the listed objects in the inventory survive if buried in the ground from the time the inventory was conducted until the present? Objects of wood and of cloth, for instance, were both very important in the colonial...