Regardless of the motives, contexts and identities - African, crioulo, mixedrace or even Indigenous - of the producers and consumers of the ceramics, their link with the historical context of slavery is indisputable. In the same vein, there seems to be a certain decline in decorated pieces as slavery entered its final years and the last generation of Africans was erased (Agostini, 2011; De Souza and Symanski, 2009). It is therefore interesting to note that eighteenth-century ceramics from the senzala in Colégio dos Jesuítas in Campos dos Goytacazes featured barely any artistic decoration. As the senzala was marked by a dynamic of internal creolization without the arrival of Africans as of the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, this seems to suggest, as was the case in Mato Grosso, that the decorative dimension of the vessels was less significant to enslaved people born in Brazil than it was to their African ancestors.  
Another important sphere of material production among Africans in the diaspora was that of metallurgy. In Africa, the casting of iron dates back to the first millennium BCE, before its wide expansion throughout the continent. Africans brought this technological tradition and its accompanying set of beliefs with them to the Americas (Goucher, 2004). The origin myths for many Central African Bantu societies featured ironworkers as founding heroes. They were also considered to hold great spiritual power as a result of their ability to transform a natural product into a cultural product by controlling fire. All of their instruments were considered to be steeped in the power of spirits and their practice required a long period of apprenticeship, which included rituals linking them to the spiritual world (Childs, 1991, pp. 338-339).