Archaeological investigations at the site of La Isabela in the Dominican Republic, the 15th century settlement of explorer Christopher Columbus, have produced signs of a troubled and failing economy at the first European colony in the New World.
The Second Voyage of Columbus
In 1494, the Italian-born, Spanish-financed explorer Christopher Columbus returned on his second voyage to the American continents, landing in Hispaniola with a group of 1,500 settlers, in search of local sources of gold and silver. There on the north shore of Hispaniola in what is now the Dominican Republic, they established the first European town in the New World, called La Isabela. La Isabela was a fairly substantial settlement, with a large royal compound for Columbus, a fortified storehouse, and a plaza with stone structures for the use of the European residents.
From its earliest days, however, the colony was troubled. The colonists faced hurricanes and crop failures, and the hostility of Hispaniola's long-time Taino residents. Columbus was called back to Spain in 1496 to explain his mismanagement of the colony; and in 1497, a revolt led by discontented settlers sacked the town and looted the fortified storehouse. By 1498, La Isabela was abandoned, and the remaining settlers returned to Spain or moved to a new location on the south shore of Hispaniola, near what is today Santo Domingo.
Archaeological Investigations at La Isabela
Archaeological investigations at the site of La Isabela were conducted in the late 1980s by a team led by Kathleen Deagan and José M. Cruxent of the Florida Museum of Natural History. During the excavations, Deagan and Cruxent identified evidence that Columbus and his men tested local precious metals.
Artifacts associated with ore assay included 58 triangular graphite-tempered assaying crucibles, a kilogram of liquid mercury, a concentration of about 90 kilograms of galena (an ore of lead), and several forms of metallurgical slag, mostly concentrated near or within the fortified storehouse. Adjacent to the slag concentration was a small fire pit, believed to represent a furnace used to process the metal. The crucibles and mercury were interpreted as evidence that the colonists were assaying the quality of local ore deposits of precious metals, and they supposed that the galena was likely some of the local ore being tested.
Using a suite of geophysical methods including optical petrography and metallography, scanning electron microscopy, and electron microprobe analysis, Alyson M. Thibodeau and David Killick and colleagues at the University of Arizona examined the raw galena ore and slag deposits from La Isabela. To their surprise, they discovered that, rather than being a local lead ore, the galena had originated in Europe--specifically, the orefields in the Los Pedroches-Alcudia or Linares-La Carolina valleys of Spain, mining districts used by Europeans for thousands of years.
Desperation Smelting
The original intent for importing galena ore along on Columbus' prospecting venture would have been as an assaying reagent, to assist in testing unknown raw ores for the amount of gold and silver content. However, at some point, and probably toward the end, the residents of La Isabela attempted, unsuccessfully, to process the galena itself, perhaps to get out what little silver there was available.
The galena is messily scattered through the entranceway of the fortified storehouse and into the area of the furnace: perhaps evidence that the attempt to process the metal took place during or after the storehouse was looted by discontented settlers in late 1497. There is also evidence that the people attempting to process the ore were novices at the task, substituting beach sand for the necessary bone ash in the cupellation process. Finally, most of the galena ore lies unprocessed. In effect, the furnace, galena ore, and slag pile are evidence of the last days of miserable failure, and a measure of the desperation of the last surviving residents of La Isabela.
More can be found on the Florida Museum of Natural History's La Isabela website, and within the books and articles listed below.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to the Lower Central America, and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Deagan K. 1996. Colonial transformation: Euro-American cultural genesis in the early Spanish-American colonies. Journal of Anthropological Research 52(2):135-160.
Deagan K, and Cruxent JM. 2002. Columbus's Outpost Among the Tainos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Deagan K, and Cruxent JM. 2002. Archaeology at La Isabela, America’s First European Town. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thibodeau AM, Killick DJ, Ruiz J, Chesley JT, Deagan K, Cruxent JM, and Lyman W. 2007. The strange case of the earliest silver extraction by European colonists in the New World. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(9):3663-3666.
VanderVeen JM. 2003. Review of Archaeology at La Isabela: America's First European Town, and Columbus's Outpost among the Taino: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1494-1498. Latin American Antiquity 14(4):504-506.
