Sugar plantations and slavery in Mato Grosso: an archaeology of identities

Abstract

This is a review of the book Sugar Plantations and Slavery in Mato Grosso: An Archaeology of Identities, a revised version of Luís Cláudio Symanski’s doctoral dissertation, defended in 2006. The book draws on a decade of archaeological and documentary research on the dynamics of slavery and the lives of people living under enslavement in Chapada dos Guimarães, Central Brazil, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing primarily on sugar plantations, the research investigated spaces where everyday lives took shape and strategies of social and cultural production developed. One of the most significant aspects of the study is its demonstration of the heterogeneity of the slave quarters and the relationships that ran through these spaces, bringing together people from different regions, languages, and identities. By articulating materialities and written sources, Symanski traces relationships among rural landowners, free workers, and enslaved people, marked by conflicts, negotiations, and social distinctions that render interpretations based solely on the colonizer/colonized dichotomy obsolete. Documents recording the identities of people from Benguela, Congo, Mina, and Angola were used in the analysis of one of the largest archaeological collections of ceramics with different decorative patterns, produced between the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, with the aim of identifying markers associated with those regions. The research thus reveals diverse transatlantic identities and diasporic experiences, challenging the image of the slave quarters as a socially and culturally homogeneous space.