Los búcaros. De las Indias para el mundo

Abstract

This article intents to gather the information concerning a certain group of fine red pottery that has been reported from a time ago in many colonial sites of various regions of Hispanic America. Even though they are well known in the archaeological sphere, there is a lack of clear historical referents that could promote the interpretation and comprehension of its significance for the societies of the recent past. Taking as a starting point the archaeological data compiled in the frame mark of the study of the material culture of the Colonial period in Panama, we propose a brief review of the literal and iconographic sources that can allow us to specify the historic and geographic identity of this pottery type, tightening up their bonds with the cultural tendencies of the Baroque period, as it was the tendency towards collection building and the taste for exotic articles. We particularly stress the relation between the mentioned pottery and a specific artifact very much desired by the courtesan elites of Spain during the Austria�s period, that is the búcaros or barros of the Indies.\nThe mentioned vessels, used to refresh and perfume the water to drink, also impressed for their unusual and delicate shapes. Moreover, these objects were distinguishing elements through which the so called bucaro-phagy developed, a practice very well documented in the literature of the Spanish Gold Century, consisting in the ingestion of búcaro sherds, specially within social high class women. This activity, claimed to have medical and cosmetic functions, has been frequently described as one of the most unusual customs prevailing within the Spanish courtesans of the seventeenth century, even though it seems to have permeated inferior levels of the Iberian and colonial society.\nThe study of the búcaros goes hand in hand with that of the fine red pottery, in a mere practical way as well as the one that leads to the extreme of the Baroque customs, as part of the archaeological record of the consumer globalization that the European colonial enterprise lead to. The methodological contribution of this paper aims to a reflection concerning the inherent conceptual elasticity involved in the process of identification and interpretation of the archaeological materials from sites dated after the European conquest of the New World. The búcaros are magnificent examples of cosmopolite artifacts own to modernity, were they impounded or inventoried for their commercial value, or treasured and represented in the Baroque paintings as explicit manifestations of a fashion tendency that, as all tendencies, ended up yielding to the changing logics of social distinction.\nBúcaro pottery resembles a multiplicity of geographic, social and cultural trajectories, dangerous and difficult to embrace in rigid typological terms, may it be in its literary or pictorial vicissitudes or in its usually tiny archaeological fragments, which give reference to its material existence.

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