ENRIQUE RODRIGUEZ-ALEGRIA

Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

Virtual Lecture

This presentation will show a glimpse of the varied Indigenous technologies that Spanish colonizers adopted in sixteenth-century Mexico City.  To examine the process of adoption, it will focus on archaeological excavations in the houses of colonizers and on archival research on the clothes mentioned in probate inventories.  Much research has focused on Indigenous adoption of European technologies in the Americas.  Scholars have shown that the adoption of European technologies among Indigenous people was a complex process that varied geographically, temporally, and according to the actions and strategies of Indigenous people and colonizers.  In this presentation, I focus on a separate, perhaps opposite pattern: how Spanish colonizers adopted Indigenous technologies, and what such a process of adoption meant for producers, users, and consumers of the products of such technologies.