M. Dores Cruz | A View from the End of the World

The Anthropology Department welcomes M. Dores Cruz to give her talk titled “A View from the End of the World: The Archaeology of São Tomé’s Plantation Complex and the Origins of the Atlantic World.”

São Tomé, officially the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, is an island country in the Gulf of Guinea (western coast of Central Africa). Colonized by the Portuguese throughout the 16th century, the island was ideal for cash crop cultivation and soon boasted a plantation economy heavily reliant on slave labor. It became an important center in the Atlantic slave trade. Cruz’s research takes a regional, multi-scalar approach to the analysis of these early plantation landscapes and sugar cycles in São Tomé and the archaeology of the origins of the Modern Atlantic world.

Cruz is a faculty member in the African Studies Department of the University of Cologne, Germany. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from SUNY Binghamton.