In October 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled unexpectedly into a world of bright mythical realities. Few events changed human history more than his encounter with what we now call the Americas. It was perhaps the greatest irony of this momentous episode that Europeans began a dialogue with the local inhabitants by expressing an interest in gold, which was coincidentally often exchanged between indigenous elites, albeit in alloyed form. Columbus admired the shiny ornaments worn by the Caribbean Taíno chiefs, for which, setting a virtually continent-wide precedent, he exchanged shiny glass beads and base-metal artefacts. At the possible site of this first meeting – a Taíno village on San Salvador island – archaeologists have found a Spanish coin, glass beads, and miscellaneous brass artefacts.
Yet, while the Taíno and the Spanish shared a superficial attraction to shiny things, they possessed very different and ultimately irreconcilable interpretations of their value and meaning.
For example, indigenous metalsmiths often preferred a copper-gold alloy – known as guanín in the Caribbean and tumbaga in South America – to pure gold, possibly because of its colour. On Mexico’s Gulf Coast, Spanish soldiers bartered glass beads for 600 gold axes which, on closer inspection, turned out to be copper. On this and many other occasions, Europeans were aggrieved by what they saw as native deception. Battle lines were quickly drawn between indigenous peoples’ ancient ideas, where materiality and spirituality were fused as one, and a European commercial imperative which separated them utterly.
