This dissertation studies the development of fashion and its representation in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Building upon previous scholarship on portraiture, pictures of types, and dress in colonial Spanish America, this dissertation bridges the study of art history, design history, and material culture with social and economic history. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines the visual analysis of portraits and pictures of types with the material study of extant garments and textiles, textual analysis of travelers’ chronicles, and archival research into inventories, wills, dowries, and commercial accounts. Divided into four thematic chapters, this dissertation examines the complex dynamics that shaped discourses about luxury, fashionability, and identity at the intersection of Andean and European worldviews in the eighteenth-century Viceroyalty of New Granada. In portraiture, elite Spanish identities were constructed from a repertoire of luxury that endowed European ideas of ostentation with the Andean appreciation for luminescence. Fashion developed as a corporeal practice of assemblage that reflected the multiethnic society of New Granada, evidenced, in particular, by three specific styles of dress endemic to the region: the faldellín (an A-shaped, calf-length skirt worn in the colonial Andes), the pollera (a full skirt used as a petticoat by Spanish women but often seen as an outer skirt in the Americas), and the bolsicón (an apron-like bag worn by women over their abdomens). These garments and other forms of fashionable attire were often created by Indigenous weavers and tailors, who translated the preinvasion “textile primacy” into the making of cloth and clothing in late-colonial New Granada. Despite the inherently Indigenous character of fashion in this colonial context, the rise of costumbrismo in the nineteenth century endowed fashion with new discourses that shaped—and populated—the nascent “Mestizo” nations, thus largely erasing the strong Andean legacy from the history of fashion and the textile arts in present-day Colombia and Ecuador. By uncovering the significant Indigeneity of fashion in late-colonial New Granada, this study provides new layers of meaning with which to understand the entangled histories of art, fashion, and textiles in eighteenth-century Spanish America.

The Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg is often presented as a “town which time passed by” (Yetter 1988:30). This narrative implies that the museum landscape reflects the actual past and that restoration efforts simply returned the town to the way it used to be. However, the Restoration was accomplished according to specific ideological goals. Colonial Williamsburg was created as a shrine to traditionalist, conservative values (Greenspan 2002; Handler & Gable 1997; Lindgren 1989; Lindgren 1993) which are intrinsically linked to the global structure of systemic White supremacy. These values were enacted during the Restoration, as Black residents of the future Historic Area were underpaid for their property and displaced into segregated neighborhoods. They were also inscribed in the physical museum landscape and in the development of historic interpretation. In the past few decades, Colonial Williamsburg has attempted to bring silenced histories to light through increased dedication to African-American interpretation. Still, this history of erasure goes largely unacknowledged by the Foundation. In this thesis, I use the First Baptist Church as a case study to demonstrate how Black history was silenced by the Restoration and how an ongoing archaeological project works to resituate the site within the museum landscape. I discuss the history of the church from its founding in 1776 through the present day, with special emphasis on the displacement in 1957 and the tropes of silencing (Trouillot 2015 [1995]) utilized in the creation of the museum landscape. The installation of interpretive infrastructure adjacent to the site in the 1960s and 1990s recognized the historic significance of the First Baptist site while simultaneously continuing the erasure of Colonial Williamsburg’s role in the church’s destruction. The 2020-2023 archaeological project incorporates community voices in the (re)interpretation of the site and provides an opportunity for Colonial Williamsburg to acknowledge its own history of racism and dispossession.

This thesis investigates what information accumulations research can provide on settlement population and sedentism in the Late Woodland Potomac River Valley. Accumulations research is a flexible method that mathematically models the relationships between past populations and the archaeological record they leave behind using the discard equation. This study reviews the available data for several different variables in accumulations research, including settlement population, use duration (occupation length) and residential stability (seasonality), and uses the discard equation to evaluate the data. My research focuses on five archaeological sites in the Potomac River Valley, which was home to several different cultural groups during the Late Woodland Period (A.D. 900 – 1600). The results provide new insight into the cultural and demographic developments of the Potomac Piedmont’s Late Woodland cultural history.

This dissertation uses “Power Ensemble” as a framework to contextualize the organization of space and its allegory of power among the Yorùbá, southwestern Nigeria, using the Ìjébú cultural landscape as a case study. Power ensemble shows that the Ìjébú palace is the microcosm of the power structure and relations that see the conglomeration of architectural, religious, cosmic, political, and economic powers, all in one place—the palace—a landscape of power. The power ensemble exposes new scholarly knowledge of the intersection of Architecture, Ritual, and Astronomy as interconnected root cultural practices that established the Yorùbá cultural landscapes. The thesis is that major rituals in the Ìjébú kingdom occur only on certain days of celestial significance and only in spaces within the palace purposefully constructed to host such rituals. The palatial architecture was also designed following principles of astronomical orientations and alignments. Thus, choreographic ritual movements, referred to here as the “architecture of ritual movements,” by default, pay attention to the astronomically aligned architecture during rituals. Since ritual is centered within the palace complex, the organization of the Ìjébú polity and the economic activities that linked its outlying towns and cities to the landscape of power becomes a function of the overall design of the Ìjébú astronomic and ritual-architectural connectedness. To this end, this dissertation employs power in two dimensions—power in space and power in time. Power in space shows the manifestations of power through architecture, ritual, and astronomy. The allegory of power through architecture examines the 180km fortification surrounding the entire Ìjébú kingdom. This dissertation shows that in addition to this fortification, the Ìjébú kingdom had multiple fortification systems within the capital city. At the center of these multiple enclosures lie the most important space—the ancient Ìjébú palace complex—which displays power across cosmic, economic, spiritual, and political levels. The practice of ritual within the palace led to the decision to excavate certain areas. This series of excavations produced an ample number of royal paraphernalia. The excavation of potsherd pavements from the palace transforms our understanding of their functions. This dissertation shows that beyond the purview of pavements as part of pathways and floors, they also functioned as mnemonic devices. The orientation of the palace to the rising sun on the equinox and the ethnographic evidence for the practice of astronomy placed the palace as an ancient observatory that connects the elements of the skyscape with the quotidian life of the Ìjébú. Power in time shows the changes and continuity of power in space over 1000 years. Using the indigenous hermeneutics of rituals and their associated dramas and expressions, the nature of “architecture, ritual, and astronomy” in the first half of the second millennium AD was brought to light. By the opening of the Atlantic trade, the Ìjébú architecture, particularly the fortifications, changed from defensive to serving economic functions. By the late 19th century, Ìjébú became the last Yorùbá kingdom to be conquered by the British force. Upon the expedition of Britain, the Ìjébú fortifications completely lost their function, and the ancient palace was deserted. Since architecture, ritual, and astronomy are interconnected root cultural practices, the Ìjébú socio-politico, and religio-economic dynamics were also distorted. The indigenous knowledge of astronomy held by the Ìjébú sages and indigenous calendrical systems disappeared. The landscape of power lost its fervor and power, except that the remnants of the culture are embedded in ritual movements and other indigenous epistemologies. This dissertation suggests that scholars of deep African history begin to see indigenous hermeneutics not only as ways of doing but as a way of knowing. This is precisely the approach employed in this dissertation research to interrogate and interpret the artifacts of the long-lost civilization.

This thesis utilizes a theoretical approach that draws on Whitney Battle-Baptiste's (2011) homespace framework combined with network theory and cultural geography to explore the enslaved community's domestic lives and social structures at Mount Vernon Plantation in the late 18th century. I argue that using homespace and network theory in conjunction with one another allows for a more complex and nuanced exploration of enslaved communities at a household level. Three datasets have been utilized that embody both quantitative and qualitative data. The first is archaeological data from the Mount Vernon excavations, obtained from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). The second dataset is a network diagram, which I created using data from Mount Vernon's Slavery Database and census data recorded by George Washington in 1786 and 1799. The final data set examines the relocations experienced by a select number of enslaved individuals throughout their lives. Through analyzing these three datasets, I demonstrate that we can better understand domestic spaces, even with a fragmentary archaeological record, by drawing on the relationships between people and individual connections to place.

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