MCEAS Seminar: Columbus’s Shovel: Mortuary Intelligence and the Discovery of Indigenous Sovereignty, 1492-1502

On 29 November 1492, Christopher Columbus and his sailors opened a basket in a temporarily abandoned house on the Taíno island of Cuba. Its contents, Columbus decided, revealed that the people who lived in that house were "the relatives and descendants of one man alone.”  This paper re-approaches that claim as the first salvo in a historic and ethnographic project that categorized Indigenous bodies as "dead" or "ancestral," whose consequences remain in our lexicon today. As the first chapter of a larger book project, it reconstructs the Christian and medieval library that Columbus and his cohort drew from to imagine deathways' centrality to all human history. It then follows its terms into Europeans' first decade of inscribing their encounter with the Amerindian present and traces one outline of what that "past" left out.

Christopher Heaney is an Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History at the Pennsylvania State University, where he trains students in the ethnohistory of science, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. 

Register here to receive a .pdf of the paper, to register for the seminar, or to receive the Zoom link for the hybrid event. https://upenn.zoom.us/meeting/register/RoIsEiQpTCOrtOFU0H1QrA#/registration

The seminar will be held both in-person and by Zoom. For those attending in person, we look forward to seeing you and welcome you to join us for the reception following the event.