If interested in submitting a paper for this symposium, please

send an e-mail (no later than August 7) briefly introducing

yourself, along with a brief abstract.  Submissions from both

graduate students and senior scholars welcome.  Papers in

Spanish or French also welcome.



E-mail to:   [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]



*****



Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting

April 26-30, 2006

San Juan, Puerto Rico



Call for Papers for Proposed Symposium:



"Smuggling in the Atlantic World"



Organizers:  Alexandra Hartnett and Shannon Lee Dawdy,

University of Chicago



SESSION ABSTRACT



How would a serious archaeological study of smuggling

transform our understanding of the Atlantic World and of

colonial economies in general?  How do we approach the

archaeology of illicit economies?  In the last 30 years,

historians and archaeologists have done much to trace the

economic outlines of the 'world system' of the Atlantic World

between the 16th and 19th centuries.  What is often mentioned

in passing, in both scholarly works and the documentary

record, is how the dominant outlines of this system were

in-filled with multiple smaller circuits of trade, many of

them technically illegal according to mercantilist law and

wartime trade embargoes.  While the importance of smuggling

has been readily acknowledged for one area of the Atlantic –

the Caribbean – serious scholarly attention to the topic has

been rare, due both to the difficulty of finding a paper trail

for an illicit activity, and to the mist of romance that

surrounds pirates and contrabandistas.  Archaeology may

provide the best (and in many cases the only) source of

evidence for important undercurrents of the Atlantic system. 

These undercurrents appear to have created significant social

networks and fomented major political movements.  This

symposium aims to bring together scholars from dispersed

countries and institutions in order to: explore the

methodological and theoretical issues raised by the

archaeology of smuggling; evaluate our current state of

knowledge of smuggling in historic period; and create our own

exchange network for potential collaborations on this topic.  



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Shannon Lee Dawdy

Assistant Professor

Department of Anthropology

University of Chicago

1126 East 59th St.

Chicago, IL 60637

773-834-0829