Many New Worlds: A Century of Transformations in the Post-Columbian Caribbean

New worlds emerged within the first generations of Spanish invasion of the Caribbean. Rather than a local event with inevitable conclusions (1492, extinction), diverse processes of survival and resistance made Europe, Africa, and the Americas. However, for too long archaeology has chased sites of first encounter, limiting understanding to a Eurocentric narrative of 'discovery'.

To address this, we bring 3 remarkably preserved sites of intercultural encounter together with a cross-disciplinary team of Caribbean experts to address the construction of the Caribbean and wider colonial world. The main question of our project is: How did diverse communities experience and create a radically new post-Columbian world?

This question is addressed through three themes, food, bodies, and beliefs, which were flashpoints in the post-1500 world. These themes are vital and present in material culture, embodied practices, and texts of the time. In the Caribbean, new cuisines were prepared by free and unfree labourers, rural and urban environments were transformed by new animal and human bodies, and communities thrashed out beliefs in new religious places.

Yet these fundamental transformations are deliberately denied in the main contemporary and historical sources. For example, Columbus asserted that Indigenous Caribbean people had no religion, that non-Christian bodies could be enslaved, and that the islands were spontaneously fertile even as colonists starved. Meanwhile new arrivals were soon eating local foods, wearing indigenous clothing, and redefining the foundations of their religions and identities.

The fundamental reworking of foods, bodies, and beliefs reveals multiple competing visions of life, as well as new and irreversible relations, which significantly differ from conventional and popular understandings of how 1492 unfolded.