Absences: Cultural Production

The archaeological work done at the site of the Quilombo, most notably undertaken by Robert Nelson Anderson, Pedro Paulo Funari, and Charles E. Orser, has turned up primarily small shards of pottery. This material, while exciting and useful as physical remains of a fugitive community that allows the presence of the quilombo to endure across centuries, comprises next to none of what would have originally been there. We lack textiles, tools, and art production including potentially sculptures or votives. We have no knowledge of the ephemeral cultural expressions of dance or song or the ways in which the many ethnic backgrounds of the peoples of Palmares would have interacted and merged over the course of the century of its existence. The culture of Palmares, in short, is lost to time, history, and colonial violence. While these things cannot be recovered and the archaeological findings remain our closest tie to the physical presence of the Palmarinos, the absence of their autonomous, unique, vibrant production must be remembered and incorporated into any discussion of the quilombo or of its interactions with the colonial oppressors. The Dutch and the Portuguese wrote the narrative and they also created the only cultural and artistic products that are extant today, but this was not the case in the moment of its occurrence. What the production of Palmares might have looked like is open to educated speculation – what is significant is that their culture is not erased out of a too-strict adherence to the colonial archive.