Material Culture, Gender and Maintenance Activities in Making and Resisting Early Modern Colonial Globalization. A Long-term Perspective from the Mariana Islands

Introduction

The proposed project will be the first to investigate the intimate connection between material culture, quotidian life, and gender in the making of and resistance to early modern colonial globalization. The 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries witnessed the rise of historical processes vital to moulding the world to its present shape.

Historical Context

While scholars have extensively studied the worldwide translocations of people, goods, and ideas, the fact that this globalization also took shape through the cross-continental circulation of engendered ideologies, policies, knowledge, material culture, technologies, and skills has not been sufficiently explored. Equally under-investigated has been how this same constellation worked in resisting globalization.

Methodology

Through a synergistic transdisciplinary approach, MaGMa will fully address these weaknesses by examining the material worlds constructed at the crossroads of Modern Colonialism, Gender Systems, and Maintenance Activities. The latter is a concept born in Spanish archaeology to highlight the foregrounding nature of a set of structural everyday practices, including:

• Care-giving
• Food-processing
• Weaving
• Hygiene and health
• The socialization and rearing of children
• The arrangement of living spaces

These practices are essential to social continuity and community well-being.

Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Bringing into focused dialogue prehistoric and historical archaeology, history, anthropology, geography, and postcolonial, anticolonial, decolonial, and gender studies, MaGMa will bind archaeological science, archaeological fieldwork, and archival research. The project will analyze cultural changes and continuities in the Mariana Islands, revealing otherwise undetected cultural features.

Project Goals

The ground-breaking combination of this array of disciplines and methods will facilitate the ultimate goal of the project: a sound and holistic understanding of how maintenance activities and gender transformations became structural in configuring early modern colonial “new normalities” across the globe.