Impression: Archaeological excavations had been carried out in the uninhabited island of Klein Bonaire, located reverse the island of Bonaire
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Credit: ArCarib
The historic archaeologist Konrad A. Antczak, a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie researcher with the UPF Division of Humanities and member of the Research Team on Colonialism, Gender and Materialities (CGyM), has just lately returned from archaeological fieldwork in the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Bonaire, in the southern Caribbean. He has carried out excavations in this region locating a camp with a warehouse for the transshipment of products, wherever he has observed wide variety of every day objects.
This excursion is aspect of the ArCarib challenge (Archaeology of Informal Commerce in the Colonial Caribbean), of which Konrad A. Antczak is the principal investigator, supervised by Sandra Montón Subías, a UPF-ICREA analysis professor at the Department of Humanities and CGyM coordinator. ArCarib, funded by the European Union as a result of its Horizon 2020 programme endowed with some 173,000 euros, commenced in April 2019 and will past until May perhaps 2021.
Informal commerce of the Spanish colonies with the Dutch islands

The undertaking is investigating what Konrad A. Antczak -fairly than “contraband”- prefers to get in touch with “informal commerce”, quoting on the just one hand the restrictive Spanish trade monopoly, and next, Spanish neglect to duly supply its colonies with essential commodities, which pushed them to trade informally with international ports. This trade flourished among the Spanish province of Venezuela and the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Bonaire in the seventeenth and eighteenth hundreds of years.
“The Kingdom of Spain was commercially quite restrictive and could only trade with Spain and its other domains, and the Dutch and the Jews who lived on the island of Curaçao observed that the Venezuelan coastline was devoid of basic commodities. Ships from Spain arrived rarely, and the men and women dwelling on the coastline needed ceramics, fabrics, foods: they recognized that there was a space for this trade with the Dutch islands, which benefited both of those sides”, clarifies Konrad A. Antczak.
Excavations in Bonaire and Curaçao reveal a big variety of objects
During this 2nd fieldwork, archaeological excavations were being carried out in the uninhabited island of Klein Bonaire, found reverse the island of Bonaire, and in a Sephardic plantation in one of the significant inner bays of Curaçao. The excavations at Klein Bonaire discovered what Konrad A. Antczak believes was possibly a camp of administrators of a goods transshipment warehouse whose ruins still keep on being in place, and wherever they stored goods that traders from Curaçao introduced to the mainland.
Between the numerous conclusions there that reflect day-to-day daily life in the camp in the initial half of the eighteenth century, shoe buckles, pewter spoons, cash, fragments of weapons and even two cannonballs quite possibly fired at the camp through a standoff have been learned. In addition, a considerable total of creole earthenware was uncovered -crafted cooking pots- which the investigator is to matter to archaeometric investigation at the College of Barcelona- to confirm no matter if they were being introduced from Venezuela together with sacks of cocoa.
Modern exploration that examines the effects of commerce on society

ArCarib is the initial archaeological job that transcends the maritime boundary concerning the islands and Venezuela and seeks to realize how items that ended up traded by sea, primarily coveted Venezuelan cocoa and other fewer recognized objects these types of as creole stoneware and European ceramics, influenced island and mainland societies.
The study of the ArCarib project focuses on how informal maritime commerce in ceramics in the south-eastern Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries influenced the daily daily life of the communities of the islands of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire and the Venezuelan coastline, specifically in regard of the identity formation processes and gender relations.
Whilst a lot has been examined about the socioeconomic and political heritage and the impacts of this commerce rooted in the area, continue to tiny is identified of its materials dimensions and how the indispensable smuggled ceramics transformed or maintained the identities and gender relations of the colonial societies of the islands and of the continent.
You can observe the development of the ArCarib job and interviews with its critical gamers on the Fb Web page and on Twitter.
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