La Guairita: Historical Archaeology of a Coffee Hacienda on the Periphery of Caracas, 1830-1930

Lemoine B., Luis A; Antczak, Konrad A.

La Guairita: Historical Archaeology of a Coffee Hacienda on the Periphery of Caracas, 1830-1930

Citation

Lemoine B LA, Antczak KA. La Guairita: Historical Archaeology of a Coffee Hacienda on the Periphery of Caracas, 1830-1930. In: KA Antczak, editor. Venezuelan historical archaeology: current perspectives on contact, colonialism, and independence. Leiden: Sidestone Press; 2024. p. 379-413.

Abstract

We present here the first published historical archaeological study of a coffee hacienda in Venezuela. The coffee hacienda of La Guairita, whose ruins are today located in a suburb of metropolitan Caracas, was in the 1830s a sizeable plantation located along a commercial road that led from the cacao- and coffee-growing towns of Santa Lucía and El Hatillo to the south and connected with Petare, Chacao, and the city of Caracas, as well as the seaport of La Guaira, to the north. By contrasting archaeological data from survey and excavations at the site of La Guairita and evidence from primary and secondary documentary sources, we paint a preliminary micro-historical picture of the hacienda’s economic network and the social and material lives of its rural inhabitants and labor force. We argue that those tending to the coffee crops and managing the hacienda were probably rural people – pardos, enslaved Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, poor white Canary Islanders – who had to diversify the production of the hacienda to weather the unstable coffee economy and the ravages of the early Venezuelan Republic’s internal conflicts and wars. This study aims to complicate simplistic notions of rurality and peripherality in Republican-period Venezuela, suggesting, among other things, that La Guairita was economically wellconnected to its hinterland, as well as Caracas and its port, and by way of this connectivity its non-elite inhabitants came to display intriguing cosmopolitan tastes.