Risky business: historical archaeology of the Dutch salt enterprise on La Tortuga Island, Venezuela (1624-38)

Antczak, Andrzej; Antczak, Konrad A.; Antczak, Maria Magdalena

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00794236.2015.1124193

Risky business: historical archaeology of the Dutch salt enterprise on La Tortuga Island, Venezuela (1624-38)

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Antczak A, Antczak KA, Antczak MM. Risky business: historical archaeology of the Dutch salt enterprise on La Tortuga Island, Venezuela (1624-38). Post-Medieval Archaeology. 2015;49(2):189-219. DOI: 10.1080/00794236.2015.1124193

Abstract

In the decades of the 1620s and 1630s the Dutch engaged in salt extraction on the island of La Tortuga, Venezuela, erecting a wooden fort, portable cannon emplacements, jetties and semi-industrial solar saltpan production facilities. The relative paucity of the archaeological record juxtaposed with the wealth of detailed documentary data and fieldwork experiences led to the operationalization of the heuristic tool of ‘scapes’. A critical construction of these socially alive portions of the island landscape and seascape demonstrates 1) how north-western European conceptions of the cultural control of nature were embodied in Dutch orderliness and industriousness; 2) how the strategy of maximization of extractive practices and minimization of risk was evidenced in the overall ephemerality of structures; and 3) how these structural imperatives were imbricated in the prose of human life and death that was unfolding from one small-scale event to another on this desolate island.