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OLD TIES.

NEW PERSPECTIVES.

Archaeology of Informal Commerce

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

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.

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