Social Science Research Council

“Daring Traffic: An Archaeology of Slavers and Slaves in Early Colonial Panama (1662-1671)”

My research project delves into both archaeological evidence and firsthand written sources in order to examine the material constitution of slavers’ social life in late 17th-century Old Panama – the first European settlement to prosper on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.  It is based on the premise that, despite the dehumanized status they were given in the early modern world, African slaves played a transforming and profoundly disruptive role in the early Spanish Empire: on the one hand, slaves were seen as necessary tradable things without which the Spanish colonial enterprise could not be sustained; on the other, African captives were perceived as dangerous entities seriously compromising the cultural basis of the colonial order. Being a slave-trader in Old Panama might not have been an easy choice to make and my project looks into the rationale of this decision-making. Who were these people who made a living out of buying and selling human lives as if they were any other sort of good? By focusing on the protective tactics assisting Western slavers in upholding their daring and nowadays unthinkable traffic, this research will allow me to evaluate the extent to which the lifestyle of European slavers was determined by the cultural force of slaves. Did slave-traders in Old Panama conceive their private object world as an apotropaic shield securing them from the alien materialities they both lived on and feared? How can the hidden voices of African slaves, as conveyed in Spanish colonial transcripts, contribute to decipher the cultural logics of their captors’ lived-space?

In order to address these questions, I will pair an intensive excavation of the ruins of Old Panama’s slave-store with a thorough search for historical records referring to the commercial activity of a Genoese company monopolizing the slave trade in the Spanish Empire by the time of Old Panama’s destruction and abandonment in 1671. This document quest will start in July 2007 and will take me first to the National Archives in Lima (Peru) and Bogotá (Colombia), and finally to the Indies Archive in Seville (Spain), the most complete repository of official records related to the Spanish colonial administration. By January 2008, the dry season will have settled in over Panama, allowing me to initiate the excavations in the Old Panama site, recently inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list as an acknowledgement to its exceptional historical and archaeological significance.