Encounters with Choco and San Vitores: Chamorro Society in the 17th-Century Mariana Islands

Shihong Bai

This study reconstructs culture contact in the 17th century Mariana Islands by tracing how Chamorro society engaged two outsiders and the knowledge practices they carried. It compares Choco, a Chinese merchant artisan from Fujian connected to the Manila world, with Diego Luis de San Vitores, the Jesuit who inaugurated the Spanish mission in 1668. Rather than treating artefact similarities as straightforward evidence of diffusion, the study asks what kinds of knowledge were introduced, how they were translated into local practice, and what material consequences followed. Drawing on a triangulation of material indications and colonial records, it shows that Choco’s influence extended beyond ironworking into the politics of belief and trust, while San Vitores increasingly fused conversion with coercive intervention culminated in “reducción” and the reordering of settlement and landscape. By foregrounding these concrete actions and their material effects, the paper argues that culture contact is best understood as negotiation over knowledge, place, and authority, and that careful cross-checking between texts and material traces produces stronger theory about selective adoption and resistance in Indo-Pacific archaeology.