Contribution short abstract:

Marronage sites in the Americas have a dual historical dimension: they are the result of the wounds caused by the colonial project (dispossession, enslavement), while at the same time being the result of healing practices (creation of the collective). The scar is the result of all of the above.

Contribution long abstract:

Based on the analysis of written sources, landscape characteristics, and archaeological materials, I discuss the emergence and persistence of a particular landscape of freedom associated with the phenomenon of collective marronage in northern Colombia. The irruption and recurrence of this phenomenon throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Montes de María region, allows me to trace the way in which maroons and their descendants transformed the asymmetrical power relations of slavery and created concrete spaces of freedom: the palenques (maroon settlements). These new sites of habitation are crossed by a double historical dimension: they are connected to the occurrence of events that hurt and cause wounds (enslavement and persecution), while at the same time being the result of acts of healing (creation of social relations and generation of spaces of collective care). I represent this dialectical condition of the production of space and the material culture that integrates it through the figure and metaphor of the scar. This makes visible the temporal and spatial transversality of the tension that accompanied the creation of community by Africans and their descendants during the colonial period.