Overview

The early-modern Venezuelan Caribbean did not lure seafarers with the saccharine delights of cane sugar but with the preserving qualities of solar sea salt. In this book, the historical archaeological study of this salty commodity offers a unique entryway into the hitherto unknown maritime mobilities and daily lives of the seafarers who camped at the saltpans of Venezuelan islands from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, cultivating and harvesting the white crystal of the sea. For the first time, this study offers a comprehensive documentary history of the saltpans of La Tortuga Island and Cayo Sal in the Los Roques Archipelago, uncovering the surprising importance of their salt. Long-term archaeological excavations at the campsites by these saltpans have brought to light the plethora of material remains left behind by seafarers during their seasonal and temporary salt forays. The exhaustive analysis of the thousands of recovered things – pipes, punch bowls, plates, teapots, buttons, bones – contrasted with documentary evidence, not only enables us to understand where these things came from but also by whom they were used. By engaging the evidence through my theoretical framework of assemblages of practice, I demonstrate how seafarers and things were vibrantly entangled in the everyday assemblages of practice of salt cultivation, dining and drinking. This multisited approach spanning 256 years, reveals that seafarers were fervent buyers of fashionable products, drinking hot tea from porcelain tea bowls, using colorful ceramic chamber pots for their hygienic needs and imbibing exotic rum punch by the scorching saltpans of the uninhabited Venezuelan islands. Intended for scholars, students and the interested public alike, this historical archaeological study positions humble seafarers in the limelight, not as the anonymous movers of international trade and facilitators of imperial interests, but as avid trans-imperial and extra-imperial consumers of the fruits of those very empires.

Full Product Details

9789088908156

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Islands of Salt is an original contribution that highlights an important industry and region of the Caribbean that has thus far received little attention from English-speaking historical archaeologists. The book achieves much more than a comparative site-based analysis of seafarer-thing relations at saltpan camps... As a scholarly resource Islands of Salt is notable for its array of colorful images, scale artifact drawings, and numerous data tables that organize artifact and historical data in ways that will be useful references.""--Krysta Ryzewski ""Historical Archaeology, Vol. 55""

Author Information

Konrad A. Antczak is a Venezuelan and Polish historical archaeologist who received his PhD from The College of William and Mary in 2017. He is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Departament d’Humanitats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Historical Archaeologist at the Unidad de Estudios Arqueológicos, Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. He was previously (2018–2019) a visiting scholar at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the historical archaeology of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century commodities, seafaring mobilities and identities in the Southeastern Caribbean. In these topics he explores the theoretical contours of human-thing entanglements, the itineraries of things, and assemblages of practice. He is author of “Cultivating Salt: Socio-Natural Assemblages on the Saltpans of the Venezuelan Islands, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century” (Environmental Archaeology) and of the review “Historical Archaeology in Venezuela” (Post-Medieval Archaeology), as well as co-author with Mary C. Beaudry of “Assemblages of Practice: A Conceptual Framework for Exploring Human-Thing Relations in Archaeology” (Archaeological Dialogues).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available