Overview

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the historical archaeology of Venezuela, marking the first time such a detailed study is available in both English and Spanish. It compiles the work of leading Venezuelan archaeologists and includes recent fieldwork and unpublished research, covering a wide range of case studies from precolonial times to the republican period. Structured in five parts, the book starts with a thorough review of the history of Venezuelan historical archaeological research, highlighting its contributions and future directions. The first section explores precolonial and contact period indigenous realities, while the second examines the indigenous experiences of colonialism, missionization, and landscape changes. The third section investigates the production of key Venezuelan commodities: coffee, sugar, salt, and contraband activities. The fourth section focuses on the archaeology of foundational cities like Coro, Santo Tomé, Maracaibo, and the development of Caracas. The fifth section looks at everyday life, including the rise of consumerism and the social practices surrounding death. An afterword emphasizes the importance of a critical historical approach in anthropology and archaeology. Richly illustrated and well-referenced, this book highlights the extensive and diverse historical archaeological research in Venezuela, offering new insights to both Spanish and non-Spanish-speaking scholars. It aims to influence historical archaeology in Latin America, the Caribbean, and globally with its bilingual presentation.

Full Product Details

9789464270945

Table of Contents

Reviews

""The text is extensively illustrated and generally well-translated, and the open-access viewer offered for both English and Spanish editions by Sidestone Press is very usable, with all the standard features offered by similar platforms at larger publishers. From an Anglophone perspective, it is easily one of the most significant publications on the topic in English since Irving Rouse and José María Cruxent's 1963 Venezuelan Archaeology, and one looks forward to seeing its enduring impact on historical archaeology in Venezuela and beyond.""--Noa Corcoran-Tadd ""Historical Archaeology"" (6/1/2025 12:00:00 AM)

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 Sklodowska-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).

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