Procesos de poblamiento en la colonia temprana americana

In the settlement processes that took place after 1492 in the Americas, different cultural
traditions interact. With the aim of exploring the territories, certain routines were
accelerated which, related to the macro-process of continental connection, created new
social and territorial realities. Exploration on this horizon was an imperial race, and the
resources found, particularly gold, were the axis of a global mobilization. As a particular
fact, settlement, in the perspective of global productive exploration, emerges as a reference
that allows us to understand inhabiting as a result of these social processes, therefore, the
interactions between the actors and their traditions make settlement the evidence. In the
case of terra firme, the climatic and geographical conditions add a particular context,
producing in the situations details that account for the forms deployed. The idea of
‘colonization’s’ specific to commercial interests is established, in which the means used,
seen from a technical perspective, are the framework for analysis, and when competition
for wealth is an argument, the nuance of the specialization of activities makes the Spanish
and Portuguese imperial the starting point for the approach. The need to dynamise the
‘productive’ points to mining and plantations as accents for the analysis, so that the ‘labor
force’ brought to the productive territories is the relief that is directly associated with the
settlement. The generation of wealth is introduced with trafficking, understood as the
mercantile scenario of obtaining this labor force, as a special process, and in this the
African populations, who arrived under slavery, is a particular scenario of understanding
for the forms of American habitation. From this perspective, the concept of cimarrón
emerges as a condition for studying the forms of settlement and architectures linked to
these traditions, therefore, a Cimarron settlement is established as an interest for studying
the settlement in the early colony in the central mining region of Colombia.