Columbus's Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498

305 Pages·2009·6.21 MB·English

by  Kathleen Deagan

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columbus s outpost among the taínos
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kathleen deagan and josé maría cruxent
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Columbus’s Outpost
among the Taínos
Spain and
America at
La Isabela,
1493 ‒ 1498
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the
Louis Stern Memorial Fund
Copyright © 2002by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107and108of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by April Leidig-Higgins and set in
Centaur type by Copperline Book Services, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by
Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deagan, Kathleen A.
Columbus’s outpost among the Taínos:
Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493‒1498
Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-300-09040-4
1. La Isabela (Dominican Republic)—Colonization.
2. Columbus, Christopher—Homes and haunts—
Dominican Republic—La Isabela. 3. Indians—First
contact with Europeans. I. Cruxent, José María. II. Title.
f1939.i8 d43 2002 972.93'58–dc21 2001046771
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for perma-
nence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
10 98 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface vii
1 1
Columbus and La Isabela
2 7
The Historical Setting
3
Reluctant Hosts:
23
The Taínos of Hispaniola
4
“Hell in Hispaniola”:
1493‒1498 47
La Isabela,
5
The Hand ofVandals and the
Tooth ofTime: La Isabela,
1500‒1987 71
6
The Medieval Enclave:
95
Landscape, Town, and Buildings
contents
7
A Spartan Domesticity:
Household Life in La Isabela’s
131
Bohíos
8 163
God and Glory
9 179
Commerce and Craft
10 201
Aftermath
11 213
Destinies Converged
229
Appendix
233
Note on Historical Sources
237
Notes
259
References
283
Acknowledgments
287
Index
To Eugenio Pérez Montás
and Rafaél Cantisano,
defenders of La Isabela,
whose visions for the future
made this work possible.
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preface
1493
In December , Christopher Columbus and his weary fleet of sev-
enteen ships limped into the Bay of Isabela after nearly three months
at sea. “I was at a point,” wrote Columbus some years later, “from
which I could no longer retreat or proceed with the ships, but had to
unload them there and establish a settlement.”1 From this inauspicious
beginning, the first European town in America was established, built on
a dream of gold and wealth through trade. Columbus named it La Is-
abela, after the queen of Spain.
Although the settlement lasted for fewer than five years, it was a sub-
stantial and very Spanish medieval town during its lifetime. Its aban-
donment marked the end of the original Spanish model for colonizing
America, and the emergence of a new strategy based on the social and
physical realities of life in the “New World.”Both the original idea and
the ways in which it changed over the first decade of Spanish presence
in America can be fully understood only by integrating the evidence
from archaeology at La Isabela with documentary evidence from the
Columbus era. Today the site of La Isabela is a Dominican national
park where visitors can see the physical remains of the fifteenth-century
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

p1
. . Aerial view of La Isabela. (Courtesy of Dirección Nacional de Parques,
República Dominicana.)
town and learn about life there through the objects displayed in the site
museum.
There is only one “first”site, and the opportunity to excavate and
study the first European town in America (and the only place Christo-
pher Columbus lived in America) was an exciting and occasionally
daunting privilege for both of us. Although our ten years of collabora-
tion at La Isabela were consistently rewarding in an intellectual sense,
they were not without challenges. There was the ever-present anxiety of
documenting this utterly singular, but physically ravaged, site as thor-
oughly as possible within the time and financial constraints with which
we, like all archaeologists, were faced. The community’s isolation, lack-
ing fresh (let alone running) water, electricity, telephone, roads, postage,
medical facilities, and public transportation presented unfamiliar chal-
lenges in organizing and implementing this complex program, particu-
larly for José Cruxent, who lived year-round at La Isabela. Frequent
changes in governmental administration of the site also created an am-
bient environment of political uncertainty.
But overriding the circumstances and routines of the research process
was the exhilaration of learning things about Columbus’s venture that
had never been known before, and uncovering the physical remains of
the settlement and material objects made and used by the first Euro-
peans in America. A new, archaeologically informed understanding of
viii * preface
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

p2 1494
. . Conjectural reconstruction of La Isabela, ca. . (Painting by Arthur
Shilstone. Courtesy of National Geographicmagazine.)
Columbus’s colony emerged from that work, and we wanted to share it
with as many interested people as possible in a nontechnical way. At the
same time, however, we felt deeply responsible for the technical docu-
mentation of the site and wanted to provide a detailed explanation of
our strategies and methods to our archaeological colleagues, who might
wish to use our data in comparative studies.
These two aspirations, unfortunately, are nearly impossible to inte-
grate in a single book. The technical details of archaeological sampling,
excavation, and analysis are the basis for responsible archaeological in-
terpretation and must be available for scrutiny. But they are also usually
distracting to nonarchaeologists and in our case tended to detract from
the flow of the larger story of Columbus’s colonial project at La Isabela.
We have chosen to address this dilemma by writing two books. In
this book, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, we present the new, mate-
rially based story of Columbus and La Isabela and explore its implica-
tions for understanding the emergence of Spanish-American society.
We have based our account on the results of the historical-archaeolog-
ical research at the site, but without detailing the technical archaeolog-
ical evidence on which our conclusions are based. A companion volume,
Archaeology at La Isabela, includes the contextual, spatial, statistical, and an-
alytical data used in reaching our conclusions. It follows essentially the
same format as Columbus’s Outpost, and each volume has cross-references
preface * ix