In the Paraíba Valley, a region located between Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo and occupied by large coffee farms in the nineteenth century, excavations in the senzalas on the farms of São Fernando (Lima et al. 1993), Santa Clara and Santa Teresa (Symanski and Dos Santos Gomes, 2016) revealed a remarkable material scarcity in comparison to the contents of senzalas in the states of Mato Grosso, Goiás and Pará, which were of much lesser economic significance. In the latter senzalas, there was a predominance of items related to the preparation and consumption of foodstuffs, including ceramics and animal remains, as was common in historical domestic units. This class of evidence was not found in the senzalas in the Paraíba Valley, as the captives in the farms of this region had few possibilities for preparing and consuming food in these spaces, owing to the fact that these farms maintained central kitchens for the captives. In Campos dos Goytacazes to the north of Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, different sectors of the senzala on Colégio dos Jesuítas - a sugar plantation which had been founded in the seventeenth century and which had over 2,000 slaves in 1800 - were revealed to be home to handmade ceramics in various proportions, in contexts ranging from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century (Symanski and Dos Santos Gomes, 2012). These ceramics make up 15 to 35 per cent of the ceramic inventory of each context.