Luís Cláudio P. Symanski

The Place of Strategy and the Spaces of Tactics: Structures, Artifacts, and Power Relations on Sugar Plantations of West Brazil

Archaeological research on two sugar plantations of the Chapada dos Guimarães region of West Brazil, the engenhos (sugar mills) of Rio da Casca and Água Fria, has provided an opportunity to study the organization and use of these spaces by planters, free laborers, and slaves. Planters organized the plantations according to a rigidly hierarchical model in which the planter’s house was the central location. They distributed European-produced goods among free laborers and slaves, aiming to reaffirm this hierarchical order. Though the slaves, in turn, had to live within this hierarchical system, they were also able to take advantage of opportunities to subvert this space, using it according to their own practices and traditions. In this sense, they invested the locally produced low-fired earthenware with sign-values and symbols related to their African backgrounds. Thus, two sets of discourses were fitted into the same landscape, composing a dialectic that characterized the multicultural space of the plantations.

Mundos mesclados, espaços segregados: cultura material, mestiçagem e segmentação no sítio Aldeia em Santarém (PA)

Com base na analise da cultura material proveniente de unidades domesticas do nucleo urbano de Santarem (PA), ocupadas nos seculos XVIII e XIX, o presente artigo discute os processos de trocas culturais entre portugueses, luso-brasileiros, indigenas e mesticos. Embora esses grupos sociais tenham manipulado a cultura material visando expressar diferentes valores, relacionados a hierarquia, segmentacao social e afirmacao de identidades, a ambiguidade e uma caracteristica das amostras analisadas, informando sobre as misturas de praticas e de referenciais culturais que levaram a construcao de uma sociedade mestica.

Iron Cosmology, Slavery, and Social Control: The Materiality of Rebellion in the Coffee Plantations of the Paraíba Valley, Southeastern Brazil

Archaeological research carried out in the slave quarters of two coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, Southeastern Brazil, revealed a material scarcity that is highly contrastive with the material abundance found on slave quarters in sugar plantation regions. In this article, we first discuss the reasons for these differences, arguing that they are related to a tight control over the enslaved foodways. Although this control could have suppressed an important feature of the African cultural practices, we argue that these groups adopted other material resources that expressed values widely shared among the Central African societies from which most of them came. These items very likely recalled a general Central African cosmology regarding the role of iron and beliefs in supernatural powers associated with blacksmiths. In the final section, we discuss the crucial role that these belief systems played in the slave rebellions that arose in this region.

A arqueologia da diáspora africana nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil: problemáticas e modelos

This article presents an overview of the main issues that have been discussed on the subject of archaeology of the African diaspora in the United States and in Brazil, adding, when pertinent, information on the contexts of the Caribbean. The goal is to furnish a wide overview on the development of the field over the last 40 years, as well as to discuss the changes in the theoretical models used to explain the social dynamics of African populations within the diaspora.

Práticas de descarte de refugo em uma plantation escravista: o caso da fazenda do colégio dos jesuítas de Campos dos Goytacazes

Este artigo tem por proposito caracterizar e discutir as praticas de descarte de refugo dos grupos escravizados que ocuparam o Colegio ou Fazenda dos Jesuitas de Campo dos Goytacazes (RJ), um estabelecimento que tinha por principal atividade produtiva o cultivo da cana-de-acucar. Escavacoes arqueologicas em quatro contextos de deposicao relacionados a ocupacao dos cativos e a ocupacao da casa grande revelaram as similaridades e diferencas nas formas de se lidar com o refugo cotidiano entre esses dois grupos antagonicos. Essas formas de descarte dizem respeito tanto a manutencao quanto a modificacao de praticas de descarte tradicionais, de origem africana. Os cativos, ao mesmo tempo em que aderiram a modificacoes nessas praticas em decorrencia da imposicao de um ideario higienista pela camada senhorial, foram aptos a manter formas mais tradicionais de lidar com os seus residuos. Deste modo, as praticas de descarte de refugo consistiram em uma das diversas taticas que esse grupo empregou para manter uma cultura diferenciada daquela da casa grande e, assim, desafiar as normas sociais que lhe eram impostas.

Introduction: Archaeology of African Diaspora Contexts in Brazil

Archaeological studies of African diasporic contexts in Brazil have expanded significantly in the last 15 years. While earlier studies in the 1980s and 1990s focused on maroon settlements, a wider diversity of contexts have been studied in the last 15 years. This broad spectrum of subjects includes plantations’ slave quarters, urban spaces, cemeteries, religious houses, and contemporary maroon settlements. This introduction presents an overview of these recent developments and of earlier studies to better locate the contributions of the articles in this thematic collection within this expanding field of research.

Material Culture, Mestizage, and Social Segmentation in Santarém, Northern Brazil

This chapter discusses the processes of cultural exchange between Portuguese, Portuguese–Brazilian, Amerindians, and mestizos based on the analysis of the material culture from households of Santarem (PA), in the north of Brazil. These groups manipulated material culture aiming to express distinct sets of values, related to hierarchy, social segmentation, and affirmation of identities, but an important feature of these household assemblages is ambiguity, expressed in the co-occurrence of local and imported items. This material ambiguity informs about the mixtures of both practices and cultural references that brought about the building of a mestizo society in northern Brazil.