MaGMa · Material Culture, Gender and Maintenance Activities in Making and Resisting Early Modern Colonial Globalization. A Long-term Perspective from the Mariana Islands

The proposed project will be the first to investigate the intimate connection between material culture, quotidian life, and gender in the making of and resistance to early modern colonial globalization. The 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries witnessed the rise of historical processes vital to moulding the world to its present shape. While scholars have extensively studied the worldwide translocations of people, goods and ideas, the fact that this globalization also took shape through the cross-continental circulation of engendered ideologies, policies, knowledge, material culture, technologies and skills has not been sufficiently explored; equally under-investigated has been how this same constellation worked in resisting globalization. Through a synergistic transdisciplinary approach, MaGMa will fully address these weaknesses by examining the material worlds constructed at the crossroads of Modern Colonialism, Gender Systems, and Maintenance Activities. The latter is a concept born in Spanish archaeology to highlight the foregrounding nature of a set of structural everyday practices (e.g. care-giving, food-processing, weaving, hygiene and health, the socialization and rearing of children, and the arrangement of living spaces) essential to social continuity and community wellbeing. Bringing into focused dialogue prehistoric and historical archaeology; history; anthropology, geography; and postcolonial, anticolonial, decolonial, and gender studies, and binding archaeological science, archaeological fieldwork, and archival research, MaGMa will analyse cultural changes and continuities in the Mariana Islands revealing otherwise undetected cultural features. The ground-breaking combination of this array of disciplines and methods will facilitate the ultimate goal of the project: a sound and holistic understanding of how maintenance activities and gender transformations became structural in configuring early modern colonial “new normalities” across the globe.