Definition: La Isabela is the name of the first European town established in the Americas. La Isabela was settled by Christopher Columbus and 1500 of his followers in 1494, on the northern coast of the island of Hispaniola, in what is now the
Dominican Republic. The colony was abandoned in 1498, because as hungry for American gold as the Spanish colonists were, they were eventually unable to deal with hurricanes, crop failures and hostility from the
Taino residents of Hispaniola. The town included a citadel built for Columbus, a fortified storehouse, several stone buildings and a plaza.
Archaeological investigations at La Isabela have been conducted since the late 1980s by a team led by Kathleen Deagan and José M. Cruxent of the Florida Museum of Natural History, at which web site much more detail is available.
The most recent published studies at La Isabela have focused on the identification of a silver smelting operation, believed by Deagan and her colleagues to have involved the smelting of European galena, probably from orefields in the Los Pedroches-Alcudia or Linares-La Carolina valleys of Spain. The purpose of the exportation of lead galena from Spain to the new colony is believed to have been to assay the percentage of gold and silver ore in stolen artifacts, and, later, a failed attempt to smelt iron ore.
Sources
Deagan, Kathleen, and José M. Cruxent. 2002. Columbus's Outpost Among the Tainos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Deagan, Kathleen, and José M. Cruxent. 2002. Archaeology at La Isabela, America's First European Town. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Thibodeau, A. M., et al. 2007 The strange case of the earliest silver extraction by European colonists in the New World. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(9):3663-3666.
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