Stephen Chambers

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department, focusing on economics and identity in Colonial America.

More About Me:

-B.A. University of Chicago, 2002.

-Author of the novels, Hope's End and Hope's War, along with a number of short stories.

Paper Topic:

Gold and Gods: ‘Things’ in the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

The historiography surrounding the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of Mexico has been necessarily ideologically charged, and though the traditional framework of the ‘black legend’ has become more nuanced in modern writings , studies of the event are typically presented solely in terms of the narrative itself or of the conquest’s subsequent impact on the populations involved . Furthermore, although a number of relevant archeological examinations have approached the subject, they have typically done so in service of the vanished cultures of the indigenous peoples . Indeed, to the extent that material culture studies—and the examination of relational ‘things’—has considered the conquest, it has typically done so wholly on indigenous terms . In this sense, the inter-disciplinary context may be said to contain two tracks: the first involves the conquest historiography proper—with both Spanish and indigenous contexts—with its attendant causes and consequences; the second concerns scholarship of material culture and archaeology of indigenous peoples. This paper proposes to re-orient the conversation by focusing the question of material culture studies and ‘things’ to the conquest itself.

Much of the difficulty in this proposed work is one of sources; indeed, limitations in documentation are exactly what have contributed to the fragmentation of Conquest studies in the first place . This basic documentary weakness is the result of the violent, sometimes arbitrary, nature of the history itself. Because of these difficulties, any exploration of the broad consequences and impacts of the collision between Spanish and indigenous civilizations will be outside the scope of this study. Instead, this paper will concentrate on two areas in which the surviving evidence is descriptive: gold and gods. These dual concerns will be explored by examining the relations and theoretical implications that surround specific objects or things in the Conquest narrative.

In the question of ‘gold,’ the study will consider the relations surrounding the ‘golden wheel,’ which appears in both Spanish and Nahuatl accounts as a gift from Montezuma to Hernan Cortes shortly after the Spanish arrival on the Mexican coast. Issues of religion are more complex. In the interest of advancing relations in terms of material culture studies, the starting points for considerations of the ‘gods’ of the conquest will be the objects of Aztec and Spanish religious iconography. By approaching the conquest in terms of ‘things’, this paper will attempt to complicate and provide coherence to the dialogue between material culture studies and the study of history.

(The footnotes for this proposal are not included.)

Posted at Oct 27/2007 12:24PM:
chris witmore Hi Stephen. I like how you have established your rational and, on that basis, situated your own research agenda. I think your angle on the documentary accounts will be fruitful and I am looking forward to following the development. More substantive comments will follow as we move on to the next steps.