60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Maroon Economy
257
displaying designs adapted from those introduced by early Spanish settlers.
Some of the objects resembled those found in archaeological digs in Cuba
(Arrom and García Arévalo 1986, 48–74). While some of these objects may
have been seized from European settlements, the Maroons obviously manufactured
quite a number of them.
Archaeological work in Jamaica on Nanny Town and Old Accompong
Town has also revealed some interesting artefacts, including terra cotta figurines;
clay pipe stems and bowls; tin glaze and Delftware; glass bottles for
wine, alcohol and medicine; fragments of firearms; a range of objects made of
lead and iron; stone implements including grinding stones and flints; Spanish
coins; glass and stone beads and buttons; charcoal; and a few cowrie shells.
As in the Dominican Republic, designs contain African, Indian and
European elements (Agorsah 1994, 176–81).
Archaeological digs at Macaco and surrounding areas in 1992 and 1993
unearthed Spanish ceramic objects dating back to the thirteenth century, and
also objects of French, Dutch, English, African (Angolan) and presumably
Indian (indigenous) provenance. The archaeologists collected more than two
thousand artefacts, of which about 90 per cent were ceramic. The artefacts
were both small and large (especially vases), of aesthetic and utilitarian value,
and some of them clearly had religious and funerary associations (Orser 1992;
Funari 1995). Here, as in digs at Maroon sites in Jamaica, Mexico and elsewhere,
it is debatable whether the Indian-style artefacts mean that the sites
were previously occupied by Indians, that the Maroon communities included
Indians, that the objects reached the sites as a result of trade between Indians
and Maroons, that they were plundered from Indian settlements, or that they
were African adaptations of Indian art forms. There is also some discussion
as to whether the forms of Catholicism so visible in Palmares indicated a
strong European presence there. Several recent writers have strongly promoted
the view that Palmares attracted oppressed peoples of various ethnicities
and cultures, and a few have even argued that the term republic, first
employed in seventeenth-century documents, speaks to this multi-ethnicity
and transculturation.
Trade
Maroons carried on an extensive underground trade with all ethnic groups –
Whites, Indians, Blacks, and Coloureds – on the plantations, in other rural