Скачать или смотреть Sweet Hell of the Mill: The Archaeology of a Colonial Sugar Plantation

‘Archaeology’ often evokes elusive traces of the past, buried by the sands of time and waiting to be ‘found.’ This is not the case for Praia Melão, where monumental ruins provide the only tangible testament to São Tomé’s early plantation history. Despite its architectural magnificence, neighboring populations do not relate to the site, perceiving it as a ruin, a place of ghosts. Dr. Cruz's work represents the first scholarly research targeting this unique site, standing as an embodiment of colonial legacies and power relations that shaped the modern Atlantic world. Political awareness and community involvement are central to the archaeological investigation being undertaken, decentering São Tomé’s materiality from empire making to focus on marginalized peoples, past and present. The archaeology being launched at Praia Melão demonstrates the strength of historical archaeology in Africa as a decolonizing, interdisciplinary lens to reconcile different forms of knowledge and promote community empowerment, but also calls the attention to the obstacles to building a new disciplinary approach in a country that has never had contact with archaeology.

Dr. Cruz is an Africanist historical archaeologist, with interdisciplinary research experience and interests that emphasize practice and critical academic engagement with materiality, landscape studies, archaeology of the recent past, and heritage and memory studies. Currently, she is Senior Researcher in the Institute for African Studies at the University of Cologne.
She has completed research in Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and Mozambique, where she developed a project on the district of Mandlakaze’s landscape, in Southern Mozambique during the 19th and 20th century, in which she discusses the biography of a landscape and its connections to political power. She is the PI of the project Bitter Island: Sugar and Portuguese colonial landscapes in the making of the modern Atlantic World, which documents, studies, and preserves São Tomé’s 16th and 17th centuries cultural heritage and history. This research is not only fundamental to understanding the development of the capitalist plantation system and the Atlantic world, but it is also the first archaeology project to be developed in São Tomé e Príncipe.