E. Rodriguez – April 2

How Natives Think, about the color green, for example.

A public lecture by Enrique Rodriguez (UT Austin)
Time: April 2, 2012 at Noon
Location: Student Activity Center 5.118

Analyzing, understanding, and communicating ideas about color has been notoriously challenging for anthropologists of all kinds. For archaeologists and historians in particular, understanding how indigenous people thought (about anything) and how they interpreted the material world has also been a real challenge. In this presentation, I combine both challenges: the study of color, and the archaeological study of indigenous ideas about color. I do this not because I like headaches, but because I want to demonstrate that we can use archaeological patterns to extract information about how indigenous people thought about material culture that is present in historical documents, but difficult to even notice without the guidance of archaeological materials. The case study in question will be the adoption of Spanish pottery among indigenous people in central Mexico in the early colonial period.