Afro-Latin American Landscapes

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session will explore Afro-Latin American landscapes of varying scales and meanings. Ways of place making were contingent and strategic and emphasized to different degrees sharp distinctions, ambiguity, or seamless inclusion. Archaeological understanding of these endeavors elucidates a spectrum of social, political, and economic dynamics during the colonial period that formed the foundation for defining fledgling Latin American nation-states and continue to inform current struggles for land rights. Case studies demonstrate that Afrodescendants have made an enduring contribution to the formation and maintenance of Latin America and the Caribbean. Archaeological examples show numerous ways that Afro-Latin Americans came to “belong” to a place. For example, some Afro-Latin American religious beliefs and practices recognized the innate power of certain kinds of landscapes. The co-creation and shaping of landscapes by both Indigenous and Afrodescendant actors shows up in alterations of terrain, new ecologies, and distinctive spatial and material environments. The papers in this session will offer diverse perspectives of how Afro-Latin Americans have and continue to make a place for themselves.

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  • Documents (7)

Documents
  • Archaeology and Ethnography on Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands (Colombia) (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tracie Mayfield.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. English settlers colonized Old Providence and Santa Catalina islands in 1629—arriving on the Seaflower, sister ship to the Mayflower—one year after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what was to become the United States, but the two colonies had very different historical trajectories. From 1629 to 1630, colonists, under the direction of the...

  • Arqueología para reivindicar: Huellas de africanía en la producción alfarera de Cartagena de Indias (S. XVI-XVIII) (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Orbegozo Hernández.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde el inicio de la trata transatlántica las poblaciones africanas y sus descendientes en América fueron inferiorizados e invisilizados en múltiples aspectos. El sometimiento y esclavización de estas mujeres, hombres, niñas y niños, pretendía despojarlos de su humanidad y convertirlos en bienes útiles. Sin embargo, nunca dejaron de ser personas ni...

  • Born into Captivity: Bioarchaeological Perspectives toward Enslaved Children and Childhood in Colonial Peru (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Maass.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity. However, in spite of these contributions, children are still infrequently...

  • Cattle Colonialism: A Comparative Perspective on Chickasaw Territory and Latin America (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Terrance Weik.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous and enslaved people’s increasing global encounters with cattle in the nineteenth century present unique vantage points from which to understand the diversity of engagements that constituted and created capitalism, settler-colonialism, and Afro-Indigenous Landscapes. The archaeology of Levi Colbert’s Prairie (LCP), in the Chickasaw territory of...

  • Color Lines, Material Culture, and the Negotiation of Social Space in the Sugar Plantation Fazenda do Colégio, Campos dos Goytacazes, Brazil (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Claudio Symanski.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work addresses the dynamic of social relations at the sugar plantation Fazenda do Colégio, in northern Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, through the analysis of the refined and coarse earthenwares recovered from the planters' house midden and from two slave quarters areas. I argue that these ceramic items exerted a central role in the construction and...

  • Landscapes of Maroon Societies in Ecuador (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Balanzategui.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation debates the permeability of eighteenth-century landscapes of colonialism and slavery in the Andean region, based on the ethnohistorical and ethnographic research of *cimarronaje and *palenques (maroonage) heritage in the Afro-Ecuadorian Ancestral Territory (between the Chota-Mira Valley and the province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador). A legacy...

  • Landscapes of Mobility and Freedom: Maroonage and the Making of the New World (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Johana Caterina Mantilla Oliveros.

    This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Francisca Angola, a creole woman of the seventeenth century, was born in one of the *palenques (maroon settlements) of the north coast of Colombia. Her mother, Lucia, and her father, Agustin, both identified as Angolas, ran away from Cartagena at the beginning of the same century. At the probable age of 70, Francisca and some of her descendants were caught...