Military Material Life in the British Caribbean

Previous research in British Caribbean colonies investigates the lives of free and enslaved military personnel during the period of Atlantic slavery, within the context of each outpost’s strategic significance. Less well known are militia infantry and artillery that were stationed at military sites from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. In Jamaica, Rocky Point Battery, later Fort Rocky, defended Kingston Harbor from the 1880s until the Second World War. Jamaican volunteer militia and enlisted men as well as European officers and engineers stationed at this battery chose a British military life that dictated a regime of rigid spatial and temporal segregation whereby imperial thinking was deployed as military strategy. This paper examines ceramics, tobacco pipes, and uniform parts as objects that reflect institutional material culture which strove for homogeneity, while simultaneously leaving room for asserting a complex set of affiliations and individuality in a setting structured by British imperialism and geographic isolation.

African Moravian Burial Sites on St. John and Barbados

This study investigates Barbados’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Moravian Christian burial sites to highlight processes of community building and culture change within mortuary contexts linked to larger political transformations, such as slave emancipation, across the island and Caribbean region. I identify historical variation in burial site materiality and spatiality to understand how burial grounds reflected and informed changes in policies and relationships within disparate congregations and the larger societies in which Moravian settlements existed. Through an examination of connections between changeable mortuary practices and social identities within shifting relationships of political power before and after the end of slavery, I highlight the significance of burial sites and commemorative practices to dynamic processes of Moravian community building, maintenance, and transformation within culturally diverse and complex societies.

Beyond Sugar

Much has been written about the “sugar revolution” sweeping the islands of the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recent work by archaeologists, however, has challenged this overarching narrative. On the island of St. Lucia, a program of landscape survey joined with a close analysis of maps and census records has revealed a very different pattern of landscape development. Underneath the remains of vast sugar estates with their monumental surviving architecture—the curing and boiling houses, lime kilns, windmills and water wheels—lies evidence of an earlier phase of small-scale plantations growing a surprising diversity of crops. Building on a legacy of subsistence agriculture inherited from the Amerindians, European settlers on St. Lucia carved out a patchwork of small holdings cultivating cotton, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, ginger, cassava, indigo, and bananas. The comparative absence of large sugar plantations allowed people without much capital to purchase and develop land, creating new opportunities for free people of color to amass wealth and gain political power. The emergence of this class of free black landowners had a profound impact on St. Lucian society, which in turn greatly affected the larger political struggles that rocked the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century.

“Poor Whites” on the Peripheries

This chapter explores socioeconomic interactions between “Poor Whites” or “Redlegs” and Afro-Barbadians as interpreted through material culture and a particular reading of a Barbadian plantation landscape. The tenantry of Below Cliff, now shrouded in dense forest, is located on the “rab” land or marginal zone of Clifton Hall plantation deemed unsuitable for large-scale agricultural production. Despite the marginality of the space in terms of plantation production and a perceived socioeconomic isolation of island “poor whites” in general, Below Cliff was a space of heightened interracial interaction. I argue that such seemingly marginal spaces (as well as the people who inhabit them) are significant arenas through which to explore the dynamic and nuanced race relations that play out in everyday life on and around the plantation. While plantation slavery was crucial in the development of modern racial ideologies and hierarchies, including attempts to rigidly impose and police racial boundaries, archaeological evidence suggests that on the local level these boundaries were exceedingly porous.

Provisioning and Marketing

Examining the variability of enslaved life across the Atlantic World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is increasingly possible with the availability of comparable data. This chapter explores the networks that slaves developed between the fields of the plantation and spaces beyond its borders. Analyzing data from two Jamaican sugar estates, a quantitative approach elucidates the conditions that facilitated enslaved people’s cultivation of surplus in provisioning areas and their access to markets that fostered the island’s internal market economy. GIS (Geographic Information Systems) analysis of cartographic data and modern soil quality data suggests the relative quality of conditions for cultivation. Assemblages recovered from slave villages on the two estates provide a sample of goods that enslaved people acquired in local markets. The results suggest that enslaved people with access to a larger amount of provision grounds with favorable conditions had greater access to the markets. More broadly, the evidence demonstrates the connections that enslaved people established to turn an exploitative system to their advantage.

Introduction

The authors in this volume use innovative techniques and perspectives to reveal stories of spaces and times where the rules of the sugar lords did not always apply. Some of these “spaces in between” hide within plantation landscapes and some are revealed by alternate views of landscapes dominated by the plantation economy. These time periods and sites have received less attention than the experience of being an enslaved person on a large sugar estate in part because the latter was a very common life of an inhabitant of the Caribbean and because of the rich documentary resources associated with large plantations.

Dimensions of Space and Identity in an Emancipation-Era Village

A map of Nevis drawn in 1871, indicated three postemancipation African Villages. Landscape survey was conducted to locate the site of Morgan’s Village. Artifacts at the presumed site suggested a strong pre-emancipation component. The Morgan’s site represents an important period on Nevis history; the transitional phase from colonial slave-based plantations to an economy with wage-labor and a free citizenry experimenting in a mature, agro-industrial capitalist mode. This was a period of nascent post-colonialism setting the stage for emergent Nevisian identity. The Morgan’s site is at 985 feet elevation associated with the ruins of Morgan Estate. The village site promised insights into the period between 1833 when the “apprentice period” ended and the 1870s as new economic and social relationships coalesced, and were mediated by global events. What was encountered instead was a village seemingly abandoned soon after emancipation, suggesting a dynamic not previously appreciated. Two historic roads bisected the site, with stacked dry-stone walls in situ. Terraces on the steeply sloped hill supported stone house platforms and rectangular dry-stone foundations. Small furrowed agricultural plots were still visible and ceramics offered clues to daily life. Preliminary analysis suggests a pre-emancipation community that evolved with the changing times.

Double Consciousness and an African American Enclave

Fleeing a tremendous rise in racial tensions and an American nationality increasingly defined by whiteness, a small group of free blacks fled the US for the island nation of Haiti in 1824 and settled in what is now Samaná, Dominican Republic. The descendants of the original settlers continued to self-identify as both “American” and “black” until the most recent generations. This chapter will focus on issues of communal identity within the globally connected Caribbean, with special attention paid to intersection of race and nationality. Oral historical and archival data will reveal how the American community in Samaná continuously negotiated the “double consciousness” of their African-American identity in a place influenced first by the black Republic of Haiti and later the white, Hispanic, and Catholic nationalism of the Dominican Republic; similar to many Caribbean communities the United States has also played an important role in the development, maintenance, and dissolution of this communal identity.

Postemancipation Shifts

After emancipation, land and the economic opportunities connected with landownership were important in individuals’ decisions about where to go and what to do. For this reason, the postemancipation period – much like its antecedent – is extraordinarily significant in terms of understanding how various territories in the Caribbean were reconstituted and became what they are today. The purpose of this paper is to examine changes that occurred on a Dominican plantation after 1838 using archaeological data, and by so doing, casting new light on the distinctive character of postemancipation life. I attempt to understand these shifts by focusing on the built environment and the changing use of space over time. Along with archaeological evidence, I engage with historical documents and ethnographic data to illustrate the preoccupations of the planter class during the postemancipation period and the ways in which the newly-freed Dominicans sought to exercise control over their own time and labor.

The Role of Caves and Gullies in Escape, Mobility, and the Creation of Community Networks among Enslaved Peoples of Barbados

While the layout of plantation slave villages demonstrate a great deal of planter control, the private landscapes of enslaved peoples offer insights into the activities and experiences where the reach of the planter was more limited. Archaeological investigations of the caves and gullies surrounding St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation in St. Peter, Barbados offer insights into the activities that some enslaved plantation workers pursued. The gullies winding between St. Nicholas Abbey, the tenantry of Moore Hill, Pleasant Hall plantation and other estates in St. Peter contain a series of caves, many of which possess material culture, including ceramics, clay tobacco pipes, and black bottle glass. These caves, as liminal spaces on the landscape between adjoining plantations, appear to have served as meeting areas for enslaved peoples and later free workers. The privacy these spaces afforded spurred physical mobility and social interaction between enslaved peoples from surrounding villages, and may have fostered activities that were not permitted in the public sphere, such as gaming and leisure. Gullies are thus viewed as conduits and corridors that connected communities in the plantation-dominated landscape of Barbados and offered a temporary respite from the challenges of plantation life.