Contesting Dispossession. Marronage´s Mobility and the Emergence of a Landscape, 17th and 18th Century, Colombia.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Access to land is still a problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (as well as other places, mostly located in the global South). In that context, the landscapes and our analysis of them are directly crossed by power relations, conflict, the creation of borders, contestation of hierarchies, etc. The current landscape of the maroon community of San Basilio de Palenque and its surroundings, at the north coast of Colombia is full of historical and present marks of contestation. Its inhabitants (black communities, mestizos and indigenous) have been suffering for centuries the different types of displacement and dispossession. In this paper, I will present some of the results of my doctoral research related to the Maroon's mobility and the reshaping of the landscape in 17th and 18th centuries. I will argue that despite the many attempts of the Spaniards, the Maroons gained access and controlled the land successfully. Finally, I will offer some additional considerations regarding the political dimension of our interpretation of landscapes. This case shows that those "scars" are not "in the past" but "in the present", re-shaping lives, memories and still offering possibilities of contestation for the actual inhabitants of the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24687