New Subjectivities – Capitalism, Colonial Subject and Archaeologist

If any one person is to be emblematic of the dilemmas of historical archaeology today, there is surely no better than Leonidas Posada Gaviria, the material man of later nineteenth century Bogotá who “made a fortune by supplying to the modernized needs and gentrified tastes of his fellow citizens”. Felipe Gaitán-Ammann paints a provocative word picture of this champion of the world of things: “as Leonidas Posada Gaviria’s life unfolds before our eyes, the city of Bogotá reveals to us as a complex heterotopic space in which politically decolonized agents succeeded in manipulating the strings of the capitalist system so as to reproduce conditions of coloniality through pre-capitalist forms of inequality and social interaction”. On the other side of town, give or take a few decades, a water cistern had fallen into disuse and was accumulating rubbish at the Quinta de Bolivar, preserving “colorful debris of coarse lead-glazed earthenwares, medicine flasks, wine bottles, piles of faunal remains, and the first archaeological toothbrush excavated in Colombia”. How can the connection with the life of Posada Gaviria be made, and given meaning? What do the ceramics found in a water cistern on an estate combined with the biography of a merchant running a glass and dinnerware shop on a commercial street in Bogotá reveal about capitalism and colonialism that is not already known? And why the toothbrush? There is a richness in these encounters with the past that is itself exotic, and a world away from the austere measurement of clay tobacco pipe fragments and musket shot that defined an earlier historical archaeology.