When Christopher Columbus established the town of Concepción de la Vega in 1498 to secure the rich, gold-bearing Cibao valley of Hispaniola, the powerful Taino chief Guarionéx and his people occupied the region. The gold of the Cibao valley, together with the large Taino population that would be exploited for labor in the gold fields, drew thousands of Spaniards to Concepción in the first decades of the sixteenth century, and it became America’s first “boom town.” The city was destroyed by an earthquake and abandoned in 1562.[1]
The Taino of the region did not survive to witness the destruction of Concepción. Epidemic disease, famine, warfare with the Spaniards, and forced labor after losing the war effectively wiped out the Taino population of central Hispaniola by the second decade of the sixteenth century. Labor was still required by the Spaniards, however, and in 1509 King Ferdinand permitted the enslavement of native peoples from other parts of the Caribbean. As a consequence, thousands of Native Americans from the Lesser Antilles, the Bahamas, Florida, and the mainland of Central America were captured and brought to Hispaniola to work in the Spanish mines and cities.
This desolate sequence of labor exploitation, extinction, and enslavement is reflected throughout the Caribbean in a variety of hybrid ceramic wares that incorporate Native American, Spanish, and sometimes African elements. These are known generally in the Spanish colonial areas as “Cerámica de transculturación,”[2] and perhaps the most remarkable of these have come from the site of Concepción de la Vega.
In 1976, Venezuelan archaeologist José Cruxent began excavating the site of Concepción de la Vega in the Dominican Republic under the auspices of the Dominican National Park Service. Among the enormous and very rich assemblage of European and Native American items from the gold mining center, he and colleagues Elpidio Ortega, José Gonzáles, and Manuel García-Arévalo recovered a large number of locally-made, hand built vessel fragments that combined circum-Caribbean native manufacturing and decorative traits with European and Native American forms. The most comprehensive treatment to date of these wares is that of Ortega and Fondeur, who refer to the ware as Cerámica Indo-Hispano.[3] Because of the general and broadly encompassing implications of the term Cerámica Indo-Hispano, however, we suggest that this particular variety be referred to as “La Vega.”
In 1996 the University of Florida began a collaboration with the Dominican National Park Service to organize, clean, identify, and curate the materials excavated from the site between 1976 and 1994. The assemblage includes 269,385 colonial period artifacts (both Spanish and Native American), and of these, 5,886 (three percent) are fragments of La Vega wares. They have come from both from the Spanish fort of Concepción de la Vega, and also from Spanish domestic contexts in the town.
Although European formal influence is evident, the great majority of examples are clearly non-European in inspiration and decoration. Three types of surface decoration dominate the assemblage, including solid red slip, La Vega Rojo (figs. 1, 2), (fifty-seven percent); red slip designs painted over a white slip ground, La Vega Rojo y Blanco (fig. 3), (thirty-one percent); and incised (sgraffito) designs on a white and/or red slip ground, La Vega Esgrafiada (fig. 4), (twelve percent). Ortega and Fondeur’s study of paste for 876 of these sherds indicated that three percent of them appeared to have been thrown on a wheel, while the remainder were hand built using coils.[4]
The red and white slip decoration has no known parallel in contemporary Taíno ceramics of Hispaniola. The decorative techniques and design motifs, however, are similar to some found in the indigenous pottery of Curacao, Panamá, and other parts of Central America. Studies are currently underway to systematically compare the La Vega wares to examples from other circum-Caribbean regions. Some vessel forms, such as pitchers, handled jugs, and candle holders, are clearly European in origin, while others, such as constricted-waist vases and pedestal pots, are reminiscent of those found in many parts of Central America (fig. 5).
Sherds from what appear to be La Vega ceramics have been found (although rarely) at several early sixteenth-century Spanish sites in Santo Domingo; however, they have not been reported so far from any other colonial sites in Hispaniola or elsewhere.[5] These La Vega ceramics fall clearly into the larger category of “colono-wares” found throughout the Americas that offer tangible expressions of multi-cultural interaction and exchange. Those from La Vega, however, also reflect the tragedy of enslavement and extinction of indigenous Caribbean peoples.
Kathleen Deagan
Florida Museum of Natural History
University of Florida
<kd@flmnh.ufl.edu>
