Abstract
SUMMARY: In the Early Modern age, Portugal was among the first European countries to engage in overseas trade and colonial ventures. The influx of new people and things rapidly transformed it into a multicultural country in permanent contact with the rest of Europe and the wider world. While we possess a vast amount of knowledge describing the overseas contacts and acquisition of goods from historical documents, in recent years archaeological excavations have begun to reveal direct evidence of these interactions. This includes thousands of people and objects such as ceramics, ivory and stone artefacts produced in overseas territories in Africa, South America and Asia. They were exported in vast amounts to several European countries, and are frequently found in archaeological excavations. These commodities were in part responsible for changing European perceptions of the world, its dimensions and cultural plurality. They also rapidly left their mark on European goods production, leading to changes in aesthetics and the introduction of new forms. This paper will discuss some of these objects in terms of how they reflect an Early Modern globalized world, and their influence on European daily life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first thanks go to the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology for inviting me to give the Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture in 2019. I met Geoff in 2006 in Exeter for the first time and his work has influenced my research in many different ways.
Talking about all the global interactions of Portugal means I need to express my thanks to everyone that has ever helped me around the world to understand archaeological contexts and the formation of mentalities. That list would occupy many pages and it does not fully express my immense gratitude to everyone who has been there for the past two decades. I leave my thanks to all of you, across the oceans and in different continents in all the places where the Portuguese settled, explored or traded.
FUNDING
This work is funded by national funds through FCT [DL57/2016/CP1453/CT0084].
Notes
20 This excavation occurred in 2019 thus all information was provided by Dr Nathalie Ferreira the team’s bioanthropologist.
26 Gomes et al. in press.
28 In 1515, King Manuel decided to organize a fight between an elephant and rhinoceros in downtown Lisbon, but the elephant fled in panic and the fight never occurred.
38 Gomes et al. Citation2015. There seems to be gender related consumption with porcelain in religious houses. While female convents present large quantities of porcelain, in male religious houses the number of Chinese porcelain objects is much less.
44 The Campo das Cebolas archaeological excavation discovered the landfilling of 16th century Lisbon river front where the garbage of that area of the city was thrown for over a century. The collection reveals all the world contacts of Lisbon with Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Unfortunately there are no plans or research project to study this site.
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