The field of historical archaeology is still young in South America, and can honestly be said to be in its infancy in Ecuador. Thus Ross Jamieson’s study of the city of Cuenca is a welcome addition to the literature, especially because his overall goal is “to use Cuenca as an example in order to examine the role of domestic architecture and domestic material culture in the Spanish colonial world” (p. xi). He begins by making the laudable statement that his work is “not an attempt to outline the patterned regularity of a monolithic Spanish colonial culture” but rather an effort to explore “how the negotiation of power in colonial Cuenca was carried out by the people who lived there” (p. ix). Specifically, he rejects the more traditional notion of material culture as a “text” whose exact meaning can be decoded by a knowledgeable expert, and argues instead that objects have...
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