ArCarib is a groundbreaking project that archaeologically explores the centuries-old maritime ties between colonial Venezuela and Curaçao and Bonaire.

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Why "informal commerce"? 

In colonial contexts, the terms "contraband’" and "informal commerce" often define unofficial commercial exchanges from contrasting vantage points – the first from the perspective of the colonizer and the second from that of the colonized.

 

This project seeks to generate bottom-up understandings of smuggling and extra-legal exchanges as an active and often moral resistance of the colonized to detrimental Spanish colonial economic measures.