Frontiers of Colonialism

"An original contribution and an important one. Presents interesting and compelling case studies in the variability of colonialism and colonial encounters."-Melissa S. Murphy, coeditor of Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas "Creates bridges to understand and compare diverse sets of data and questions, incorporating larger ideas of colonial and indigenous structure, action, reaction, and agency. These new insights may turn over some previously held understandings of what we associate with colonialism and how to perceive it."-John G. Douglass, coeditor of New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest "Pushes archaeologists out of familiar theoretical, methodological, and regional silos to expand understandings of colonial context and relations between old-timers/indigenous people and newcomers/colonists."-Siobhan m. Hart, coeditor of Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology Featuring case studies of prehistoric and historic sites from Mesoamerica, China, the Philippines, the Pacific, Egypt, and elsewhere, Frontiers of Colonialism makes the surprising claim that colonialism can and should be compared across radically different time periods and locations. This volume challenges archaeologists to rethink the two major dichotomies of European versus non-European and prehistoric versus historic colonialism, which can be limiting, self-imposed boundaries. By bringing together contributors working in different regions and time periods, this volume examines the variability in colonial administrative strategies, local forms of resistance to cultural assimilation, hybridized cultural traditions, and other cross-cultural interactions within a global, comparative framework. Taken together these essays argue that crossing these frontiers of study will give anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians more power to recognize and explain the highly varied local impacts of colonialism.