Did Columbus and the Spanish explorers of the New World cast off the Indians living there with mirrors and beads to enrich themselves with mountains of gold? No, it didn't work that way, argues Floris Keehnen, student of Caribbean Archeology at Leiden University in his master's thesis. With this he won the Volkskrant-IISH Thesis Prize.
Christopher Columbus and the other Spanish explorers who set foot on the island of Hispaniola in 1492 described extensively in their travel reports how they robbed native Indians, the Taíno, of mountains of gold and only had to give them worthless utensils in return.
Because of this, and the bloody subjugation of the Aztec Empire by the later Conquistadors the impression has arisen that the Taíno were mainly powerless, willing victims of brutal Spanish conquest.
But that image doesn't do justice to how these Native Americans and the early Spanish explorers actually met each other. Master's student of archeology Floris Keehnen conducted extensive research into this for his graduation thesis and concluded that this meeting, as well as the trade in gold and 'worthless utensils', was much more on the basis of equality.
Supernatural sparkle
The Taíno, for example, did have gold, but they attached a very different value to it than the Europeans. The brilliance of the objects brought by the Europeans was a magical and supernatural way for them to capture the cosmos. “The original inhabitants of the New World had a very different worldview than we do,” explains Keehnen over the phone.
“For them, everything was connected in some way. They did not know the division of the world into strict categories as we do. For them, for example, people and plants did not differ from each other in the way we see it now. After all, supernatural spirits could manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. So they could appear as human one day and as a plant the next.”
“A special, supernatural category of objects was what the Native Americans called 'gua'. We see this reflected in the names of many things that had a "magical shimmer" in them in one way or another. 'Gua' was a prefix or suffix and you can see it in names of glittering metals, the designation of a magical bird like a parrot, but also in the names of great Indian leaders," Keehnen said.
“Even before the arrival of the Europeans, the indigenous population traded on a large scale in objects that had glitter:polished hardwood, precious stones, translucent shells. Archaeologists find objects like this all over the Caribbean. This trade indicates that they placed great value on such items. And the explorers' mirrors may have had much more 'gua' than, say, gold.”
Blue bead
Keehnen got the idea to explore the context of the encounters between the Spaniards and the Taíno when he excavated an Indian settlement in the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola with a group of archeology students from Leiden University. That settlement was thought to have been abandoned well before the explorers arrived. But then Keehnen made a special find:a blue, clearly Spanish bead.
“That bead indicated that the settlement must have been inhabited when the Spaniards arrived there,” he says. “What was that bead doing in an otherwise completely Native American environment? How did he get there? That sparked my interest and I decided to find out how the contact between the explorers and the Indians went and what approaches they took to meet each other.”
That initial question eventually resulted in an extensive research report of no less than 256 pages. By combining all kinds of different perspectives from anthropology, social history and archeology in a smart and innovative way, Keehnen came to completely new conclusions. 'Real world history in the modern sense of the word', according to the laudatory jury report.
Keehnen would like to continue his research. That is why he is now writing a PhD proposal. He also knows a good destination for the 1500 euros that the thesis prize earns him. “Despite being twenty-five years old, I still have to get my driver's license. Or else a nice trip to the Caribbean.”