Reinterpreting Amazonian Earthworks: Emergence of the Black Amazon

• In Event: Materialities of Earthwork Cultural Landscapes in the Black Atlantic: Technologies, Architectures, and Cosmologies

Description for Program

The Black Amazon is often overlooked in the archaeological discussion of earthwork features, vegetative history, ceramic traditions, expansive settlements and other indicators of broad scale landscape formations. Much of this dialogue is relegated to the cultural development of Indigenous peoples. However, the seventeenth through twentieth century colonial presence of enslaved Africans, the freed Blacks, Maroons and their descendant communities, provides us with an alternative application of these traditional theories and the application of post processual explanatory models and research tools. The following discussion with focus on multi-scalar archaeological research about eighteenth-century Suriname Maroon ancestral settlements and their associated earthwork features that are reflective of broader Amazonian landscape formation. This research raises questions about the type of intersections Maroon had with Indigenous peoples, the appropriation of Indigenous landscapes by escaping slaves, trade between Maroons and Indigenous peoples and the creation of a uniquely Maroon landscape. To date, archaeological, ethnohistorical and archaeometric data, challenges how we differentiate the Maroon landscape from the Indigenous landscape, if at all.

Author

• Cheryl White, Anton de Kom University of Suriname