Materializing Identities: Personal Adornment and Non Verbal Communication in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Colony of Floridablanca, Patagonia

NUVIALA, VICTORIA; SENATORE, MARIA XIMENA

Toronto, Canadá

Congreso; Society for Historical Archaeology 42nd Meeting; 2009

Society for Historical Archaeology

   In recent decades, several scholars studying non-verbal communication have examined the role of material culture within that process. Dress & personal adornment have been considered an essential fragment of what Wobst has termed ‘artifactual communication’.  An assemblage of artifacts from the eighteenth-century Spanish colony of Floridablanca, on the coast of southern Patagonia, sheds light on how objects associated with personal adornment interacted with the process of non-verbal communication.  Of particular importance are those aspects of these objects that can be related to the personal identities of the individuals with which they were originally associated.