Paper short abstract:

Integrating colonial records (17th-18th cen.), archaeological and ethnohistorical data, we provide historical context for interpreting and ultimately preserving Indigenous stone landscapes in the Minisink region of today's New Jersey, USA.

Paper long abstract:

The highland region known as Minisink (today northwestern New Jersey, USA), is well known among archaeologists and Munsee-Lenape communities as an important Indigenous place, featuring a complex of stone landscapes. Here we examine colonial sources from Dutch, Swedish, and English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to provide historical context for interpreting and ultimately preserving these sites. We suggest that the Minisink region emerged as a borderland beyond the periphery of imperial knowledge but still recorded in visual and written colonial documents. Reliant upon Indigenous informants, colonists represented Minisink as a site of speculation and potential mineral wealth. As colonial violence destabilized the wider region, Minisink’s unknowns became a source of anxiety and a real threat to colonists. Bringing together colonial speculations, Indigenous refusals, ethnohistoric and archaeological data, we re-read this borderland as a record of Indigenous land defense that suggests the significance of ceremonial landscapes to Munsee peoples.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the extractive history of enslaved Africans exported to the Americas through Fort Amsterdam, Ghana, in the 18th century. It is a history that engages the hidden relationship between ritual execution and the transmutation of enslaved captives into human commodities.

Paper long abstract:

The slave forts and castles that punctuate Ghana’s historic Gold Coast stand as monumental reminders of the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, beginning with the construction of Elmina Castle by the Portuguese in 1482 and ending, at least officially, with Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Built as “factories” for bulking enslaved Africans for sale and transshipment to the Americas, they served as highly regulated sites of Afro-European exchange and interaction when the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Brandenburgers entered the so-called African Trade.

In this paper, I focus on one critical link in this transatlantic value-chain where enslaved captives from Ghana’s hinterland were brought to Fort Amsterdam (formerly Fort Cormantin) and auctioned off to European traders en route to the Americas. Known as Otsir grove in the town of Abandze, it is easily missed on the Accra-Cape Coast highway where it is overshadowed by Forts Amsterdam and Anamabo, which rose to prominence in the mid-eighteenth century. Located within a subcommunity of a subcommunity, however, Otsir’s sacred grove congeals an extractive history of profound significance within its trees, throughout its grounds, and beneath the earth. It is a history that speaks to the autochthonous layers of an occupied territory, historically labile sovereign centers, the core ritual template of the eighteenth-century Fante state, and the fundamental relationship between the ritual execution of criminals and the transmutation of enslaved captives into human commodities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the creation of borderland spaces of gold extraction and notions of the environment in the Guianas— the territory between contemporary Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. It centers on the imbrication of shamanic time and the legal construction of a disputed borderland territory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the creation of borderland spaces of gold extraction and notions of the environment in the Guianas— the territory between contemporary Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. It centers on the imbrication of shamanic time and the legal construction of a disputed borderland territory. An ex-miner turned vehicle operator and speculator reflected once that ‘gold is a jumbie’ —where jumbie is the Creole term for a malevolent spirit and corresponds to Karinya (Carib), Lokono (Arawak), and Warau notions of spirit entities. His explanation that such spirits live deep within the earth and need to be summoned with the appropriate offerings—women’s bodies, alcohol, and blood—provides an important way of conceptualizing the environment and the ethics of borderland extraction. Making life in these borderland spaces seems to necessitate operating fluidly across three time-scapes—negotiating the Amerindian, African, and European material past of a trafficking frontier, the shamanic past and astral planes of the otherworld, and the geological past of mineral deposits. Methodologically, the paper places indigenous and diasporic cosmologies around minerals and their presence in this region in relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discussions of “terra nullius” and the specific regional history of the discovery and expansion of gold mining. By privileging the vision and worldviews of those who dwell in these lands, the paper also reflects on how local borderland ecological thinking impacts the broader international economic, legal, and environmental struggles around mineral resource extraction in the region today.

Paper short abstract:

This essay argues for attending to other cultural understandings of conceptualizing the political and economic divide between nature and culture and sacred and profane, by thinking through the implicit knowledge excavated through deep histories of material culture.

Paper long abstract:

The ravages of Latin American colonialism commenced on the island of Hispaniola with gold mining and the use of Taino forced labor. In response to the demographic collapse, enslaved Africans replaced them as the primary labor force on the Island, providing the foundation of the plantation economy. As Elizabeth Deloughrey (Allegories of the Anthropocene) has noted, it is only through the elision of indigenous histories that the current climate crisis can be seen as a novel problem. This essay considers how “backstreaming” contemporary ethnography can offer a useful heuristic for excavating implicit popular knowledge about the environment enabling historians to see the operations of Indigenous and Diasporic technologies across time and space. Also, this approach might enable us a more ground-level and local perspective on the Anthropocene than much of the big data research which has been dominated by the global north. Centering upon modes of interaction with the natural world such as the use of ritual stones, plants and earth derived from Indigenous and Diasporic practices in the borderlands, this essay uses the capacious definition of technology defined by Bauer and Norton to expand our understanding of time and space in the natural world. It argues for attending to other cultural understandings of conceptualizing the political and economic divide—and if it all there should be one—between nature and culture and sacred and profane, by thinking through the implicit knowledge excavated through deep histories of material culture.