The proposed project will be the first to investigate the intimate connection between material culture,
quotidian life, and gender in the making of and resistance to early modern colonial globalization. The 16th,
17th, and 18th centuries witnessed the rise of historical processes vital to moulding the world to its present
shape. While scholars have extensively studied the worldwide translocations of people, goods and ideas, the
fact that this globalization also took shape through the cross-continental circulation of engendered
ideologies, policies, knowledge, material culture, technologies and skills has not been sufficiently explored;
equally under-investigated has been how this same constellation worked in resisting globalization. Through
a synergistic transdisciplinary approach, MaGMa will fully address these weaknesses by examining the
material worlds at the crossroads of Modern Colonialism, Gender Systems, and Maintenance Activities. The
latter is a concept born in Spanish archaeology to highlight the foregrounding nature of a set of structural
everyday practices (e.g. care-giving, food-processing, weaving, hygiene and health, the socialization of
children, and the arrangement of living spaces) essential to social continuity and community wellbeing.
Bringing into focused dialogue prehistoric and historical archaeology; history; anthropology,
geography; and postcolonial, anticolonial, decolonial, and gender studies, and binding archaeological
science, archaeological fieldwork, and archival research, MaGMa will analyse cultural changes and
continuities in the Mariana Islands revealing otherwise undetected cultural features. The ground-breaking
combination of this array of disciplines and methods will facilitate the ultimate goal of the project: a sound
and holistic understanding of how maintenance activities and gender transformations became structural in
configuring early modern colonial “new normalities” across the globe.