This thesis explores English representations of America and Americans from the 'discovery' in 1492 to the establishment of the Jamestown colony in 1607. In examining this earlier period of English engagement with the New World, this thesis aims to illustrate the many ways that sixteenth-century understandings of America impacted the development of English colonial discourse, from shaping where colonies should be located, to influencing how native populations should be incorporated into colonising schemes. In particular, this thesis establishes two fundamental sixteenth-century approaches to the construction of English colonial ideology: the use of continental European portrayals of America that were manipulated and adapted to meet the discursive demands of early English projects in the New World and the selective appropriation of frameworks of knowledge, both old and new, that were employed in an attempt to explain the new lands across the Atlantic. The following chapters analyse the various processes by which an English colonial discourse, focused on America, came into being. This thesis assesses how English colonisers and explorers constructed the theory of empire using Old World frameworks of understanding, examines how explorative failures and an oscillating English religious, economic, and cultural landscape affected early English colonial discourse, and explores how the practicalities of English trade and settlement in the New World manifested themselves in descriptions of native appearance and behaviour and in accounts of the American environment. By employing a methodology of 'thick' contextualisation and close reading, and by interpreting travel narratives and colonial texts as sites where rhetoric, inter-textual influences, and cultural priorities converge, this thesis enhances historical understandings of the development of English colonial ideology. The formation of early English colonial discourse took place within an international framework of European rivalry and shared cultural heritage and a domestic context of fluctuating economic, political, and religious circumstances. This discourse, which was first articulated in the sixteenth century, was therefore the product of a complex process of assimilation, manipulation, colonial competition, and cultural appropriation.

This thesis presents the results of a multi-disciplinary investigation of a variant Ancestral Pueblo mortuary rite at Wallace Ruin, southwest Colorado (USA). This multi-storey building is one of four Lakeview Group great houses connected to the Pueblo II regional system centred at Pueblo Bonito of Chaco Canyon some 100 km to the south. From c. AD 1060-1150, Wallace Ruin functioned as a ritual-economic centre with a small residential component. Then, habitation of this great house, the Lakeview Group and all domiciles within 10 kilometres ceased. However, three or more decades later at least six rooms were used as a non-residential, Pueblo III mortuary facility for a minimum of 32 individuals. This utilisation was in marked contrast to the enduring Ancestral Pueblo practice of residential burial, usually in the extramural midden. The interrogation of several hypotheses regarding this anomaly entails a bioarchaeological approach that integrates skeletal evidence with spatial analyses regarding diachronic mortuary location choices at Wallace Ruin. Taphonomic methods that segregate bone displacements during corpse decomposition in a filled versus a void space provide accurate determinations of the depositional versus discovered mortuary microenvironments. The diachronic analysis of data from roughly 200 San Juan Region sites reveals additional ways in which Wallace’s Pueblo III mortuary program departs from longstanding communities of practice, whether great house or domicile. Chief among these are the use of a surface room floor and the postural arrangement of supine bodies with knees upright. These results, in combination with material culture evidence, form the basis of this thesis: The Pueblo III mortuary program at Wallace Ruin is a variant rite that entails a Mesa Verde Region reformulation of a Pueblo Bonito house society. The sanctioned retrieval of objects of memory offers a plausible explanation for intentional intrusions into two mortuary contexts. Beyond addressing questions concerning Wallace Ruin, a major contribution of this study includes advancement of the house society model as an interpretive scheme for evaluating Mesa Verde Region socio-ritual dynamics. This research also demonstrates the effectiveness of anthropologie de terrain (Duday, 2006) to retrospectively determine the original status of Ancestral Pueblo mortuary microenvironments. The refinement developed for this study, in which Range of Motion criteria are used to detect large-scale movements of lower limbs during corpse decomposition, is suitable for bioarchaeological analyses the world over.