Guanín, tumbaga, and caricuri: Gold in the Spanish Caribbean enterprise
The discovery and colonization of the American continent changed the course of
history for Europeans and Indigenous peoples alike. The cultural and material
exchanges that began when Columbus first reached the Antilles in 1492
revolutionised the Old World’s economy and subsistence system. Specifically, silver
mining exploitation in the Andean region of modern-day Peru and Bolivia propelled
and sustained Spanish global trading dominance until the end of the colonial period.
In the paper, I focus on the very first period of contact (ca. 1492-1540) in the
Caribbean (modern Antilles, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama) between Spaniards
and Indigenous peoples, when gold was the most important metal traded by the
Spaniards to Europe. Relying on Spanish chronicles (Columbus, Martyr d’Anghiera,
Fernández de Oviedo, Juan de Castellanos, among others) and documents from the
Archivo General de Indias, in Seville, I reconstruct the place of gold in the early years
of the Spanish colonial enterprise in the continent, culminating in the foundation
and abandonment of Santa María de la Antigua, capital of Castilla de Oro (Golden
Castile) in the Darién, between 1510 and 1524. What did the Spanish understand
about Indigenous metalworking techniques and sensibility towards the material? Did
Indigenous notions regarding precious metallurgy influence the Spaniards’ way of
thinking about gold, its uses and values in the New World? To what extent can we
separate reliable information regarding Indigenous Caribbean metalworking
traditions in these early accounts from the aspirations, fears, and hopes that gold
encapsulated for the conquistadors in a yet unknown land? Soon a catalyst for the
most exploitative and violent strategies of colonization, gold never lost its symbolic
and even supernatural influence on the invading Spaniards. What resulted was an
amalgam of old concepts brought from Europe, new words and experiences acquired
on the ground, and projections and expectations moving forward.
Alessia Frassani obtained her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. She was Assistant Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial
Art History at the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá (2010-2013) and Postdoctoral
Researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University in the Netherlands
(2013-2017). She has published two books on Mexican topics (Building Yanhuitlan.
Art, Politics, and Religion in the Mixteca Alta, 2017 and Mesoamerican Codices:
Calendrical Knowledge and Ceremonial Practice in Indigenous Religion and History,
2021) and several essays on pre-Columbian and colonial Colombian art, focussing on
the Caribbean cultural exchange, Indigenous art history, and colonial painting.
