Mapping Marronnage: Creating, Managing, and Visualizing Archival Datasets

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the nineteenth century, captive Africans in Guyane, a French colony and overseas territory in northeastern South America, increasingly sought their own freedom leading up to definitive abolition in 1848. Colonial administrators recognized the practice as a problem and began systematically documenting instances of marronnage, thereby creating a rich archaeological data source. Records related to the act of running away—and oftentimes subsequently recapture and re-enslavement—include details unavailable in other archival sources for this time and place, including naming practices, personal adornment choices, presumed African places of origin, the materiality of nineteenth-century Guyane, and the physical scars of slavery, in addition to spatial information related to sites of enslavement and strategies of escape. In this paper, I discuss the process of creating data from these archival fragments and propose ways of visualizing the information to reconstruct social and spatial relationships. While marronnage was much more prevalent in neighboring Suriname, where long-standing maroon communities persist to this day, the archival record offers one of the only ways to illuminate the existence and extent of the practice in the French Amazonian context.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37245.0