Luis Claudio Pereira Symanski
Verified email at gmail.com
Departamento de Antropologia e Arqueologia/Professor-associado
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
I have published 38 papers in Journals from Brazil, the United States, and Argentina; 11 book chapters in volumes organized in the same countries; I have organized two books on the archaeology of African Diaspora and one authorial book on household archaeology in Brazil. I have taught as full-time professor at The Federal University of Parana and The Federal University o Minas Gerais, in Brazil, and as Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois in Urban-Champaign. I am co-editor of the Springer´s Series Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology since January 2021.
EDUCATION
College degree - Archaeology - University Estacio de Sa. Year: 1993
Master degree - History - Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. Year: 1997
PhD - Anthropology/Archaeology - University of Florida. Year: 2006
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Archaeology of African Diaspora in Brazil; Archaeology of Capitalism; Household Archaeology; Archaeological Theory
FUTURE PROJECTS
Quilombos e a constituição de sociedades neotéricas no Mundo Atlântico - Maroon settlements and the constitution of neoteric societies in the Atlantic World
Research on colonial maroon settlements in Brazil and in other sectors from the Atlantic world, ir order to address the processes of building new identities in contexts of resistance to the colonialism.
Applications Invited
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Luís Cláudio Pereira Symanski and Rafael de Abreu e Souza
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, ISSN: 10927697, eISSN: 15737748, Pages: 975-997, Published: December 2021
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Luís Cláudio P. Symanski and Flávio dos Santos Gomes
Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, ISSN: 21619441, eISSN: 21619468, Pages: 174-197, Published: 2016
Informa UK Limited
Archaeological research carried out in the slave quarters of two coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, Southeastern Brazil, revealed a material scarcity that is highly contrastive with the material abundance found on slave quarters in sugar plantation regions. In this article, we first discuss the reasons for these differences, arguing that they are related to a tight control over the enslaved foodways. Although this control could have suppressed an important feature of the African cultural practices, we argue that these groups adopted other material resources that expressed values widely shared among the Central African societies from which most of them came. These items very likely recalled a general Central African cosmology regarding the role of iron and beliefs in supernatural powers associated with blacksmiths. In the final section, we discuss the crucial role that these belief systems played in the slave rebellions that arose in this region.
Luís Cláudio P. Symanski
Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, ISSN: 21619441, eISSN: 21619468, Pages: 63-70, Published: 2016
Informa UK Limited
Archaeological studies of African diasporic contexts in Brazil have expanded significantly in the last 15 years. While earlier studies in the 1980s and 1990s focused on maroon settlements, a wider diversity of contexts have been studied in the last 15 years. This broad spectrum of subjects includes plantations’ slave quarters, urban spaces, cemeteries, religious houses, and contemporary maroon settlements. This introduction presents an overview of these recent developments and of earlier studies to better locate the contributions of the articles in this thematic collection within this expanding field of research.
Luís Cláudio Pereira Symanski and Denise Maria Cavalcante Gomes
Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, Pages: 199-217, Published: 1 January 2015
Springer International Publishing
This chapter discusses the processes of cultural exchange between Portuguese, Portuguese–Brazilian, Amerindians, and mestizos based on the analysis of the material culture from households of Santarem (PA), in the north of Brazil. These groups manipulated material culture aiming to express distinct sets of values, related to hierarchy, social segmentation, and affirmation of identities, but an important feature of these household assemblages is ambiguity, expressed in the co-occurrence of local and imported items. This material ambiguity informs about the mixtures of both practices and cultural references that brought about the building of a mestizo society in northern Brazil.
Luís Cláudio P. Symanski and Flávio Gomes
Historia, Ciencias, Saude - Manguinhos, ISSN: 01045970, Issue: SUPPL.1, Pages: 309-317, Published: December 2012
FapUNIFESP (SciELO)
Nesta nota de pesquisa apresentamos questões teóricas e metodológicas sobre uma investigação em arqueologia histórica iniciada recentemente, que visa analisar o cotidiano da escravidão, regimes demográficos, práticas culturais etc. Um levantamento de sítios arqueológicos em antigas senzalas e fazendas escravistas do Vale do Paraíba e norte fluminense está sendo realizado. Com a cooperação de historiadores, arqueólogos e antropólogos, registros da cultura material de populações escravas de origem indígena e depois africana estão sendo localizados nas escavações iniciadas na fazenda jesuítica do Colégio em Campos dos Goytacazes (RJ), administrada por religiosos e depois leigos nos séculos XVII, XVIII e XIX.
Luís Cláudio P. Symanski
Historical Archaeology, ISSN: 04409213, Pages: 124-148, Published: September 2012
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Archaeological research on two sugar plantations of the Chapada dos Guimarães region of West Brazil, the engenhos (sugar mills) of Rio da Casca and Água Fria, has provided an opportunity to study the organization and use of these spaces by planters, free laborers, and slaves. Planters organized the plantations according to a rigidly hierarchical model in which the planter’s house was the central location. They distributed European-produced goods among free laborers and slaves, aiming to reaffirm this hierarchical order. Though the slaves, in turn, had to live within this hierarchical system, they were also able to take advantage of opportunities to subvert this space, using it according to their own practices and traditions. In this sense, they invested the locally produced low-fired earthenware with sign-values and symbols related to their African backgrounds. Thus, two sets of discourses were fitted into the same landscape, composing a dialectic that characterized the multicultural space of the plantations.
Luís Cláudio Symanski
Historia Unisinos, ISSN: 15193861, Pages: 294-310, Published: September 2010
UNISINOS - Universidade do Vale do Rio Dos Sinos
Marcos André Torres de Souza and Luís Cláudio Pereira Symanski
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, ISSN: 10927697, eISSN: 15737748, Pages: 513-548, Published: December 2009
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
In the region of Chapada dos Guimarães, Western Brazil, planters relied heavily on slave labor during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this article, we examine the locally produced pottery found on slaves contexts in five rural sites of this region. Based in data from probate inventories and the pottery decorative variability we suggest that slaves used decorated pottery to express cultural and social differences.