In 1493, on his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus founded a royal trading colony on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Equipped with 17 ships and 1,200 to 1,500 men (and perhaps one woman), Columbus named La Isabela after the queen of Spain. It was the first Spanish settlement in the Americas. For all its promise, the colony a failure, and five years later it lay in ruins. Historians have long placed the blame on Columbus’s ineptitude as a colonizer, but the archaeological record tells a different story.
Venezuelan archaeologist José María Cruxent and Florida archaeologist Kathleen Deagan spent 10 years excavating the site on the isolated northern coast of what is now known as the Dominican Republic. This volume presents a new story of Columbus and La Isabela and explores the emergence of Spanish-American society. For readers interested in the technical aspects of the excavations there is a companion volume, Archaeology at La Isabela (also available from Yale).
What the archaeological record revealed was a well-organized and well-equipped expedition that quickly established a formal colony in the fashion of a Spanish town. While the historical record is rich in details of the unhappy lives of the Spanish elite, there is little mention of the workers and the local Indians, the Taínos. The archaeological record alone tells their story, and the authors conclude that the Spanish social and economic institutions were inadequate for an American colony. The discovery of gold on the southern side of the island sealed La Isabela’s fate.
Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos is an outstanding account of the first Spanish colony in the New World that clearly illustrates the importance of historical archaeology and how it expands the historical record to give a more comprehensive view of what happened.
