Parsing Hybridity: Archaeologies of Amalgamation in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

Abstract

In recent years, archaeologists have used the term hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret amalgamated forms of material culture. But do postcolonial notions of hybridity (sensu Bhabha 1994; Hall 1990; Young 1995) differ in any meaningful ways from models of cultural mixture traditionally employed by anthropologists such as syncretism, creolization, and acculturation? Or is this simply a matter of semantics, citation practices, and the adoption of yet another example of trendy anthropological jargon by archaeologists? In this chapter I consider the meanings associated with the concept of hybridity, exploring what this term offers for the archaeological interpretation of colonial encounters. In doing so, I compare and contrast hybridity with acculturation, syncretism, bricolage, creolization, and mestizaje in order to identify the subtly differing connotations of these concepts, as well as highlighting the contributions that postcolonial notions of hybridity offer for contemporary archaeology through a case study from the seventeenth-century Pueblos of the American Southwest.