| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Columbus's Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498. By Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. x, 294 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-09040-4.)

Archaeology at La Isabela: America's First European Town. By Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xxxiv, 377 pp. $60.00, ISBN 0-300-09041-2.)

Christopher Columbus may have been confused in thinking that he had reached the Indies, but he was determined to make the most of his discovery; when he returned in 1493 he came with an array of artisans and settlers to establish a complete Spanish settlement on the island of Hispaniola. Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent explain in these two volumes what they have learned about how he went about doing that. In the course of some twenty years' research, they have discovered evidence that will change what we think about this settlement as a base line for Spanish colonialism in the Americas. The authors stress that the material evidence is crucial to revealing what the documentary evidence does not: the practices of everyday life and the doings of ordinary people.

Deagan and Cruxent found, for example, that the Spanish settlers did not construct the layout of their new town in the kind of grid-like street pattern that would be characteristic of later Spanish settlement; instead, they followed the natural features of the land in laying out a wedge-shaped settlement with its outer edge defined by the sea. Nor did they huddle in one single place. Nearby sites located next to appropriate resources were set up for brick, tile, and pottery making, stone quarrying, and shipbuilding. Those crafts were soon in use to assist in the building of the primary public buildings of La Isabela: the royal warehouse, powder magazine, and church and Colum-bus's fortified house (which probably served as a refuge for the whole settlement)—as well as a wall surrounding the settlement. Columbus's plan, then, was flexible enough to make wise use of the site, but it also insisted upon an imposing familiarity and permanence in the public buildings of the settlement, which were all built to late medieval Andalusian patterns.

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