Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in Between

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Introduction

The Caribbean Spaces in Between

JOHN M. CHENOWETH, JAMES A. DELLE, AND LYNSEY A. BATES

On a small island called Little Jost van Dyke, five kilometers from the regional population center of Tortola, sit the long-abandoned ruins of a house. Tamarind trees shade these ruins, their roots finding tiny spaces in between the stones and pulling them slowly apart (Figure 1.1). This island is known to the historical record primarily because of one of the people born there: John Coakley Lettsom, a white man of English descent who in the eighteenth century moved away from this poor island, gained an education, and established a successful medical practice in Britain, including treating members of the royal family. Such connections to power, money, and European elites are frequently found in the written record of the Caribbean. Moreover, these islands, large and small, supported European empires and formed the foundation for the economic engine that ran them, fueled by sugar, rum, and profits squeezed from the blood and sweat of enslaved people.

While much has been written of late about the archaeology of the colonial Caribbean (e.g., Delle 2014; Hauser 2011; Kelly et al. 2011) this volume explores sites, themes, and times often overlooked by historical archaeologists. The small, marginal site of Little Jost van Dyke exemplifies the central role often played by these neglected spaces in between, revealing how the mainstream narratives of European empires and elites like John Coakley Lettsom are framed by often-untold backstories and simplifications. During his life, Lettsom had little to say about his modest creole origins or those whose labor paid for his education; they did not fit with the high society in which he circulated. Nevertheless, his racial identity allowed him to gain access to the elite circles of the imperial core, a privilege that led to a well-recorded life history present in the documentary record of empire.

Figure 1.1. Mid-eighteenth-century house foundations on the Lettsom Site, Little Jost van Dyke Island, British Virgin Islands. (Photograph by John M. Chenoweth)

Although the social and racial structures of his day allowed Lettsom to remove himself from Little Jost van Dyke, there were, of course, those whose racial identity prohibited such free movement. It was primarily the hands of the enslaved Africans of Little Jost van Dyke that built the walls that are now slowly being ruined by the encroaching forest, but little remains in the written record to document their lives. In recent decades, archaeology of the historic era has turned toward the stories of those of little note (Scott 1994): those literally rarely noted by documentary records but also seen as unimportant by the elites of their day, a view that archaeology aims to counter. Understanding the lives of the invisible men and women of the empire has long been a focus of Caribbean historians and archaeologists (e.g., Craton 1978; Handler and Lange 1978), but here archaeological work has the added responsibility of understanding the long, sinuous roots of empire: trading networks, military structures, and religious groups in addition to the plantation system itself. These were organizations that stretched worldwide but whose presence was often felt (and fought) in the microscale of daily life. Both of these avenues of research—understanding the sinuous connections between Caribbean plantations and empires and returning those edited out of history to their deserved place—are vibrant avenues of research that are far from exhausted. Yet the chapters in this volume seek to focus our attention on a different set of stories that have so far mainly fallen through the gaps in Caribbean historical archaeology.

The Spaces in Between

Michel de Certeau famously defined a difference between place as the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence and space as living or practicing in this place, taking into consideration the vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables…. In relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken (1984:117). We find this distinction a useful one in imagining the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean. At first glance, few institutions were more emplaced—more stable, ordered, and structural—than the Caribbean plantation. The physical order of fields, village, and great house implies and creates social order of free and enslaved, wealthy and poor. But any student of the Caribbean knows that this stability is to some degree illusory. As the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers (de Certeau 1984:117), so was the plantation landscape transformed by the active living of those who inhabited it.

In de Certeau’s terms, space and place coexist since space is practiced place (1984:117). In life, even the most ordered of places were lived and negotiated as active spaces, and the two are not separable—some areas being declared places and others spaces. In this way, the space of our title is not literally de Certeau’s, and his distinction of space and place is not necessarily played out in every chapter. Nonetheless, we find this perspective useful in directing us away from a view of ordered stability and the plantation core: a story of oppression and control that, although not wrong, is incomplete.

The site on Little Jost van Dyke described above was the subject of archaeological research that focused on the traditional plantation core of the site: the owners’ house and the homes of the enslaved people held there (Chenoweth 2011, 2012, 2014). Even in this isolated setting we find evidence of the long economic and social arms of empire: manufactured goods, signs of broader religious movements (Quakerism), production geared toward the export of cash crops for the empire, and so on. A traditional focus on an emplaced plantation was not the goal here, and the site was considered as lived (as a space), but the focus remained on this core.

While valuable, an alternate view of this site and the empire to which it was tied is also possible. The slow growth of European empires within the island communities of the Caribbean was enacted in regimes of everyday practices that [were] more mobile and flexible than one might imagine but that nevertheless resulted in the development of cemented social and economic hierarchies (Hardt and Negri 2000:194). Even on the well-studied plantation, there are creative negotiations, spaces being made. While necessarily subordinate to many aspects of imperial goals, local people created their own spaces both within and outside of the imposed divisions established in the colonial world.

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The oppressions of the European empires have been well studied by historians and archaeologists alike. While the stories in this volume frequently entail oppressions, our collective goal is to understand the strategies of people who sought to maintain their own spaces inside or outside the fixed borders of the plantation. All parts of the Caribbean were shaped by similar forces, including race-based chattel slavery, sugar production, capitalism, and the tropical and sometimes deadly natural environment. Embedded in these commonalities, however, is a great deal of diversity. Large sugar plantations populated by hundreds of enslaved Africans have rightfully received a great deal of attention from archaeologists, historians, and the public. They were, however, not as totalizing as a passing glance might reveal, and they cannot be understood simplistically as expressions of the wills of their white owners (Battle-Baptiste 2011; Fellows and Delle 2015; Hauser 2008; Singleton 2001; Wilkie and Farnsworth 2005).

At the same time, these sites do not account for the experiences of everyone in the Caribbean. Other large groups of people lived very different lives, including the great majority of free people who owned only a handful of enslaved people or none at all (Higman 2014:531), the free black population, and a sizable minority of the enslaved who were held on smaller operations. 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 (Higman 2014:531).

Other spaces in between are opened up by looking at a time when the plantation system as it had existed was being restructured during the transitions surrounding and following emancipation in 1838. As Kenneth G. Kelly, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong note, while slavery-era archaeology has spoken for those denied a voice in written history, archaeology has not been similarly applied to the post-slavery period, and yet emancipation did not suddenly render workers ‘with history’ (Kelly et al. 2011:244). And yet archaeologists have not been quick to investigate this period (although there are important exceptions, such as contributions to Barnes 2011). Particularly in the Caribbean, archaeologists have yet to fully realize the potential to consider this important time (Hicks 2007; Wilkie and Farnsworth 2011).

The authors in this volume aim to take up the challenges posed by these observations through the analysis of lesser known contexts, such as Dominica, St. Lucia, the British Virgin Islands, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the reexamination of unfamiliar settings in more well-studied islands, including Jamaica and Barbados. Despite grueling work regimes and the social and economic restrictions of slavery, people held in bondage carved out spaces in plantation societies ordered and placed by others. In similar fashion, studies of the lives, of non-elite Europeans, continental soldiers, and free people of color demonstrate that binary models of black slaves and white planters do not fully encompass the diverse landscape of Caribbean identities as they were negotiated both before and after emancipation. The studies in this volume employ innovative research tools and integrate data from a variety of historical and archaeological sources to better understand these alternate stories within and beyond the sprawling sugar estates and their modes of order.

Historical Archaeology in the Caribbean

While a full review of historical archaeological work in the Caribbean is beyond the scope of this introduction, our suggestion that the works in this volume expand in a new way on this body of work necessitates some discussion of its shape. There are a number of bibliographies and guides to the literature that expand on the discussions considered here. These are usually grouped by the colonial power whose colonies they concern, as in predominantly Spanish (e.g., Curet 2011; Deagan 1988; Ewen 1990a, 2001), English (e.g., Delle 2014; Delle et al. 2011; Hamilton 1996; Watters 2001), French (e.g., Delpuech 2001; Kelly 2008, 2009, 2014), and Dutch (e.g., Haviser 2001) settlements, but other subject-oriented bibliographies, such as Bell’s (1994) on cemeteries or Orser’s (1992) on plantation slavery also include much Caribbean material.

Historical archaeological work in the Caribbean can be loosely classed into five groups. The earliest Caribbean archaeology was concerned with the earliest European occupations. In the 1960s, archaeologists turned to documenting how the enslaved people who made up the bulk of the Caribbean population lived and saw the world. While the role the environment played in shaping human society was a key focus of processual work in 1970s and 1980s, in the late 1990s researchers began to study archaeological landscapes, focusing on the way the physical environment was seen and shaped socially. Beginning in the late 1970s Caribbean historical archaeologists began to search for Africanisms—cultural survivals carried by African-descended peoples across the middle passage and into the New World. Finally, critiques of the search for such Africanisms led to a new focus away from acculturation toward creolization, the creation of a new uniquely Caribbean culture, and its expression and negotiation. These categories are, like any such grouping, heuristic rather than absolute, and many works cross or blur the lines. For instance, the important theme of how African-descended peoples resisted their own enslavement and thwarted the ends of their enslavers rather than being passive victims cuts across several of these categories. Also, despite the roughly chronological sequence in which these trends appeared, it is not suggested that any one has or should replace any other, and high-quality work toward all of these goals continues.

European Firsts and Early Colonialism

The Caribbean islands have been seen as a microcosm of the larger economic and social processes of colonialism, and the importance of the earliest colonial encounters there is frequently mentioned. Yet records of these settlements are few and far between, and so these were the topic of some of the earliest historical archaeology.

The first first in Caribbean colonialism, is, of course, the landfall and legacy of Columbus, and there has been much effort expended to locate his ships’ earliest stopping points in the New World (Brill et al. 1987; Hoffman 1987; Keegan 1996:267–268). A counterpoint to this work has come in a renewed focus on the people who discovered Columbus (Keegan 1992) and how they fared after their ill-fated discovery. Kathleen Deagan has authored some of the earliest and most extensive works on postcontact native life, and has examined the devastating results for some of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean during the earliest years of contact, 1492–1520 (Deagan 1988; Deagan and Cruxent 2002). William Keegan (1996:268–270) describes the decline of native populations and the introduction of new domestic animals, which provide the best evidence of early European-contacted sites as opposed to European-sourced artifacts.

Obviously, the earliest European settlement in the Caribbean was Spanish in name and primarily Spanish in culture, and reconstructing lifeways in these settlements has also been a main goal of archaeology. Again, Kathleen Deagan provides an overview of this work on Spanish-American settlements that focuses on settlement patterns, reconstructing architecture, trade and the origins of European artifacts, changes to the environment as a result of colonization, and syncretic items representing crossover of native forms or materials with European ones (and vice versa) (1988; see also Thomas 1992 especially pp. 225–315). The alteration of European life-ways upon arrival in the Caribbean was studied by Bonnie McEwan (1986), who compares the sites of Puerto Real and Santo Domingo. In the end, her conclusion is that few changes were made to Spanish lifeways in Puerto Real because of greater access to wealth, and this is contrasted with Santo Domingo’s less wealthy status, reliance on military supply lines, and long-term settlement, which forced them to adopt local foods and materials.

The Caribbean environment’s role in the early development of European settlements is the subject of a comparative zooarchaeological analysis conducted by Elizabeth Reitz (1992), who compared faunal remains at four early Spanish sites. The role of the environment is suggested to have been primary, with Hispañiola providing a good breeding ground for European cattle due to the lack of indigenous diseases, other ruminants, or predators, while preexisting ruminant populations bearing diseases are suggested for the failure of domesticates to flourish at Cubagua and Spanish Florida, and the extreme heat of Nueva Cádiz and other sites made life difficult for all but pigs. In a work on the 1503 settlement of the Spanish at Puerto Real, present-day Haiti, Charles Ewen (1990b) attempts to understand explicitly how life for Europeans changed and creolized through the colonial process. He concludes that there is a broad pattern of Spanish colonial adaptation in which technomic (utilitarian) items were adapted from local materials and the common practices of enslaved Native and African groups, whereas sociotechnic (more socially significant) items were not and remained exclusively European in origin.

Those of Little Note

In 1994 Elizabeth Scott framed her book Those of Little Note as one that tells the stories of those rarely noted in the historical record. Archaeological inquiry is one approach to recapture some of those stories, and this has been a particular focus in the Caribbean. Jay Haviser (1999) explicitly cites a need to fill in the gaps left in written history as the reason behind his 1999 edited volume African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean and laments the archaeological attention focused on the firsts noted earlier.

Armstrong’s early work at Drax Hall in Jamaica traces how the Afro-Jamaican population developed a new and distinct cultural context that drew upon a variety of African as well as European and possibly Amer-Indian patterns (1985:262, 265). Lydia Pulsipher and Conrad Goodwin (1999) attempt to reconstruct the unrecorded haptic perceptions of the enslaved who lived on Galways Plantation, Montserrat, arguing that we must consider the cultural meaning of the landscape as experienced by past people if we are to reconstruct the lives of those who inhabited it. Historical accounts of chains and beatings cannot fully capture the oppression of slavery, and the long-term damage done to persons’ bodies through repetitive work and poor conditions is revealed through direct analysis of burials by several authors (Courtaud et al. 1999; Jacobi et al. 1992; Khudabux 1999; Mann et al. 1987; Watters 1987, 1996). James Delle and Kristen Fellows (2014) use different lines of evidence, including documents and aboveground analyses of cemeteries, to consider the role of burial placement and commemoration in the negotiation of power between Jamaican plantation owners and workers both before and after emancipation. This account provides us with both an unwritten story of resistance and an account of identity creation and community building.

The institution of slavery makes race a paramount feature of Caribbean life, and of the study of the Caribbean past. However, people were also little noted on the basis of factors other than race. An attempt to consider social relations of gender is made by Erica Hill (1995), who associates women with thimbles through their work in domestic contexts using finds from several Caribbean sites and reports potential for gleaning information on women’s household production, gender relations, and age from thimble analysis (see also Reilly, this volume, on a group of disadvantaged poor whites).

The fact that the market economy among enslaved people was substantially more developed and more important than historical records suggest has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological work. Jerome Handler and Frederick Lange (1978) touch on this issue in their landmark study of life under slavery in Barbados, citing primarily historical information to describe the internal market system there. Pulsipher and Goodwin (1999) use primarily historical evidence to describe the gardens of the enslaved and the selling of produce to others in slavery and passing traders alike, which took place at the margins of large sugar estates. In a sense, they suggest, this strategy allowed the enslaved to prevail over the plantation system and represents a premier cultural feature of their lives (Pulsipher and Goodwin 1999:24). In addition to being an economic exchange, this trading network, particularly as revealed through low-fired earthenware ceramics, also represents social exchange. Hauser and Armstrong (1999:89) discuss this process in their analysis of the free inhabitants of the East End, St. John, and their relationship with the rest of the island and the nearby Caribbean. Armstrong’s extended study of the East End community of St. John goes beyond the material items traded and considers the whole maritime venture, suggesting that the market afforded African Americans greater access to social and economic autonomy, and perhaps even freedom (Armstrong 2003:12). In a similar vein, Hauser’s work (2008) on the composition, production, and exchange of low-fired earthenwares in Jamaica demonstrates not only the complexity of the networks formed between enslaved individuals but also the integrated nature of plantation and market communities. Another example is the work of Heather Gibson (2009), whose study of the market economy of Guadeloupe bridges the temporary emancipation of 1794–1802 and suggests that markets provided a measure of stability through the tumultuous revolutionary period.

A different perspective on this market economy is provided by Delle (2008), who sees it as part of the suite of practices used tacitly by white planters to oppress those they held in slavery. Markets provided access to manufactured goods but also bred dependence on these goods; after emancipation decreased access to provisioning grounds, the new oppression of wage labor was the only means to acquire these materials. Delle also discusses this transition from communal to individual, independence to more market dependence, in reference to religion and missionization, connecting wage labor and participation in the market economy with religious evangelization (Delle 2001). Laurie Wilkie and Paul Farnsworth also argue for alternative motives in whites’ tolerance of these hidden markets, suggesting that at Clifton Plantation in the Bahamas, owner William Wylly attempted to minimize his overhead by granting his enslaved people more free time to work their own lands and encouraging their participation in the market, although they suggest that the attempt backfired (Wilkie 2001; Wilkie and Farnsworth 2005).

Landscapes of Trade, Community, and Control

The role of the Caribbean itself as an environment and a landscape has also been the subject of study, along with how this environment was manipulated by people for social ends. The Caribbean is a large area, and some parts are extremely remote from trading and population centers. Despite its present-day paradisiacal image, many areas are extremely harsh and difficult to farm. While not deterministic, the geography and environment of each island has had a role in how its occupants live, move around, and build their communities. An example is provided by the frequent discussions of potable water and the difficulties of obtaining it on small islands. Armstrong (2003) even sees water use as an issue that united the East End community of St. John, and both Barry Higman (1998) and Christopher Clement (1997) suggest that the availability of water sometimes determined many aspects of plantation development. Norman Barka’s (2001) detailed history of landscape use on St. Eustatius highlights the role of environmental as well as social factors in determining how settlements were spread across the island at different time periods (see also Seiter, this volume).

Most authors, while not unaware of environmental factors, focus on the more human aspects of settlement. Armstrong and Matthew Reilly (2014) have recently considered an early version of the postcolonization Caribbean landscape with their study of a pre-sugar plantation in Barbados. One of the few studies that considers indentured Europeans as well as enslaved African laborers, this analysis also highlights the fact that the sugar landscapes that have received so much attention did not arise de novo but rather after a generation or more of Caribbean colonialism. Another version of these early landscapes is given by Hauser and Armstrong (2012), arguing that early settlers on some islands outside the mainstream of colonial process were actively avoiding formal government structures, creating in the process informal settlements quite different from expected models. In a study related to same authors’ contributions to this volume, Krysta Ryzewski and John Cherry (2015) demonstrate that the complexity and diversity of plantation landscapes in the island of Montserrat can best be studied with a multiscalar approach to the whole island rather than a focus on individual plantations only (see also Bates, this volume; Delle, this volume.)

Spaces were also structured to create and constrain social relationships. Clement (1997) considers the spatial structure of Tobagan sugar plantations, describing the typical layout primarily as a function of practical needs of the white owners, such as power for mills and surveillance position for great houses. He also considers the performance value of plantation main houses, built to make statements to and foster a sense of community among the plantation owners. Delle analyzes the construction of landscape and how it was used in the negotiation of relationships between owners and enslaved people, arguing that class structure was reified by the spaces reserved for members of these distinct classes; this class-stratified space was manifested most directly in the creation of the material spaces of overseers’ houses and great houses (1999:147; see also Smith and Bassett, this volume.)

Dan Hicks (2007) applied the long tradition of British landscape archaeology to St. Lucia and St. Kitts and argued for a shift from a seventeenth-century model of feudal landscapes, enforcing power directly—for instance, with walled enclosures and militaristic organization—to a later, more classical rhetoric of power created through organized and improved landscapes. The rhetoric of improvement included landscapes that acted as theatres or machines, where the material, ideational and transatlantic landscapes of the planter elite were imagined and worked out (Hicks 2007:63). Control of nature (e.g., through the placement of the house), of time, and of the enslaved peoples’ lifestyles through surveillance were central in this landscape (see Lenik and Beier, this volume, for a related postemancipation discussion). John M. Chenoweth (2014) connects plantation layout to the social processes of identification, as race and religion interacted on a small plantation in the British Virgin Islands. Here the landowners manipulated space and material culture in order to improve their social and financial lot, recast their religion (Quakerism) into a form compatible with the slavery-based economy, and differentiated themselves from the enslaved people they held.

The difficulties of long-distance transportation exacerbate differences between class groups. Joe Joseph and Stephen Bryne’s (1992) work in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, compares wealthier and poorer areas and notes a correlation between wealth (defined through historical documentation) and the source of trade materials, with the highest status people using non-Spanish imports, middling people relying on Spanish imports, and the poorest using locally produced items. Farnsworth (1996) also considers trade and exchange, comparing two Bahamian plantations’ access to markets. He concludes that on isolated sites such as the Caicos Islands plantation of Wade’s Green, the distance from the market and difficulty of transportation had more effect on the ceramics recovered than personal choice or social factors such as ethnicity or socioeconomic status. On the other end of the spectrum, Georgia L. Fox’s (2002) analysis of tobacco pipes in Port Royal speaks to the huge volume of trade and commerce that went through that site before the 1692 earthquake. She sees them as a reflection of English society’s growth from feudalism into mercantilism and industrialism, as they were one of the first disposable commodities (see also Fox 2015).

Cultural Continuity: Searches for African Survivals

Kofi Agorsah (1999:62) cites a substantial number of works that have made contributions toward the effort to re-affirm Africa’s vital enduring cultural contributions to the New World and global community. Some of the earliest Caribbean archaeology to focus on nonwhite populations was part of an effort to find traces of the African cultures the enslaved were forced to leave behind. Agorsah (1999) compared sites in Ghana and the Caribbean, looking for African settlement patterns in the African-descended communities in the Caribbean to tease out commonalities that speak to the patterns of social behavior, particularly the use of house yards, and has also tied resistance efforts to the cultural backgrounds of the African-descended enslaved people held in Caribbean plantations who escaped to form maroon communities in cooperation with remaining native groups (Agorsah 1993; Goucher and Agorsah 2011).

James B. Petersen and colleagues (1999:160) and Barbara J. Heath (1999:197) define an African-derived tradition of low-fired earthenware production based on modeled construction (rather than wheel throwing), open firing, and lack of glazing. Petersen and colleagues go so far as to suggest that there is a pan-regional, Afro-Caribbean ceramic tradition (1999:189). They also use ceramic temper to suggest interisland trade, with Antigua as a focal point of manufacture, and speculate that this trade may have had a homogenizing effect on ceramic production, although they ultimately pull back from a monolithic picture of Afro-Caribbean material culture traditions (1999: 188–193). On the other hand, Heath (1999), while still seeing the pottery as a panregional phenomenon, focuses on the creole nature of these ceramics. She highlights earthenware’s historically documented use in foodways, for water, and even for spiritual and musical purposes, suggesting that these may also be used to recognize panregional Afro-Caribbean ceramic traditions along with vessel form.

One of the earliest substantial works in Caribbean plantation archaeology is that of Handler and Lange (1978) and their colleagues in various subsequent related publications that discuss evidence for a strong African influence on burial customs among the enslaved people of Barbados. In analyzing over 100 burials, Handler, Robert S. Corruccini, and Robert J. Mutaw (1982) encountered several remains with what they termed tooth mutilation. They cite a number of sources connecting this practice to African religions and list a number of other circum-Caribbean examples. Handler also considers African cultures to aid his interpretation of an unusual burial in Barbados that was consistent with several African religions’ treatment of witches or other ostracized persons (Handler 1996). Armstrong and Mark L. Fleischman consider burials of enslaved Africans in house yards in Jamaica, suggesting African origins in their choice of location close to the living (Armstrong and Fleischman 2003).

Creolization and Ethnogenesis

As productive as these searches for African backgrounds have been, some would now take exception to their focus on pan-Caribbean and pan-African generalities. Hauser and Armstrong (1999) argue that the search for Africanisms has substantial problems, characterizing some studies of low-fired earthenware ceramics as all or nothing views of both artifacts and the people who made them; there is a danger, they suggest, of homogenizing the very diverse set of ethnic affiliations of Africa. Wilkie and Farnsworth sum up similar critiques, noting that, by focusing on individual cultural materials and practices, scholars may only serve to create essentialized, static, and fragmented portraits of Caribbean culture (Wilkie and Farnsworth 2005:4). Theresa A. Singleton (1998) made a related argument: that enslaved Africans are sometimes depicted as mere recipients of culture change and that some studies do not adequately consider power relations.

Many studies have engaged deeply with this critique. Armstrong (1990) has argued that European-origin artifacts in Jamaica could have been used differently by those of different backgrounds and therefore can be analyzed to reveal African worldviews as they interacted with these new materials. Wilkie (1999, 2000) draws attention to how manufactured items selected by enslaved people can similarly speak to African symbolic systems. She suggests that, while little success has been found in the search for explicit Africanisms, more progress might be made by considering how African-Americans selectively appropriated those [mass produced] goods that best reflected their cultural sensibilities and enabled them to construct New World creolized identities through new material culture (Wilkie 2000:11). In their study of a Bahamian plantation, Wilkie and Farnsworth (2005) highlight the diversity of the experience of the enslaved, some of whom were born in Africa and had presumably built lives and families there, while others were born into slavery. The study suggests that the Bahamian culture as it stands today was not created simply from a borrowing of generalized African and generalized European practices but that many components—cultural, historical, environmental—shaped how those on this site negotiated their way in the plantation system.

Higman (1998) combines historical sources and archaeology, aiming to provide a more complete story of one plantation, considering house structure and how it reveals social relationships, foodways, clothing, and ornamentation as well as reviewing considerations of the idea of community and arguing for its applicability for enslaved groups. Farnsworth (1999) identifies African roots for ethnomedical practices, consumer choices, and foodways reflected primarily in ceramic forms and decoration (even though the forms are European in origin) in his comparative study of life on Bahamian plantations, but he also considers the connections to modern Bahamian society. Candice Goucher’s (1999) discussion of metalworking in African beliefs and Caribbean practice, though finding few direct connections beyond African-derived designs in New World metalworking, considers the whole suite of associations that are part of the cultural memory of those transported to the Caribbean.

Cultural identifications were never static but were constantly in motion. Farnsworth considers typical Bahamian housing for the enslaved, suggesting that there were many influences from West Africa and also possibly from England, though the execution was Bahamian, producing a truly creole house form(2001:268). On a broader scale, Armstrong’s major work (2003) on the creole community of St. John charts how, over time, a group of small planters and the people they held enslaved melded into a single community. Through the lenses of exchange, age and gender relations, and religion, he studies how residents forged new paths and emerged as active participants in the broader regional community (2003:319).

Stories of the Spaces in Between

Using this literature as a foundation, this volume explores alternate stories of empire through archaeological investigations of sites that fall outside the usual scope of large cash-crop plantations and their cores. To examine the diversity of Caribbean people who carved out lives under imperial control, these case studies examine communities that included enslaved Africans, free people of color, and Europeans within islands controlled by one or more European powers. The authors not only address communities whose contribution to broad narratives of Caribbean history is overlooked but also employ innovative analytical techniques to take a new look at those previously considered. Their analyses fall roughly into two primary themes. Authors in part 1 (chapters 2–7), The Spaces Between and Within, discuss the spheres of interaction of several social groups inhabiting sanctioned and illicit spaces outside the plantation core during the period of slavery. Incorporating new approaches to scale and landscape, several of these chapters also consider different kinds of plantation spaces and paths of movement between them. Authors in part 2 (chapters 8–13), Transition and Postemancipation Analyses, take up the challenge noted earlier to investigate Caribbean daily life directly prior to and following emancipation. These chapters range from the period of apprenticeship into the twentieth century. For reference, Figure 1.2 presents an overview of the Caribbean region with the islands of focus noted, along with the authors who discuss these places.

Figure 1.2. Map of the Caribbean with islands and sites discussed in the volume indicating the authors whose chapters focus on each. (Map by John M. Chenoweth based on data from the Pacific Disaster Center, ghin.pdc.org)

Part 1: The Spaces Between and Within

In chapter 2, Frederick H. Smith and Hayden F. Bassett discuss archaeological investigations of the caves and gullies surrounding the St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation in Barbados. While the layout of plantation villages demonstrates a great deal of planter control, the private landscapes of enslaved people offer insights into the activities and experiences where the reach of the planter was more limited. The caves, as liminal spaces on the landscape between adjoining plantations, appear to have served as meeting areas for enslaved people and, later, free workers. The privacy of these spaces afforded physical mobility and social interaction between enslaved people 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.

Matthew C. Reilly explores socioeconomic interactions between poor whites or Redlegs and Afro-Barbadians in chapter 3, interpreting these 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. Reilly argues 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 played 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 at the local level these boundaries were exceedingly porous.

In chapter 4, Lynsey A. Bates analyzes the relationship between plantation landscapes and the people who altered and maintained those landscapes in order to facilitate the understanding of slavery across different spatial and temporal contexts. The plantation system as embodied in Jamaican sugar estates required that estate owners create a suite of strategies that maximized labor, time, and space to make cash-crop production profitable. At the same time, enslaved people developed their own strategies to use the domestic and agricultural spaces of the plantation. To assess these sets of strategies, this chapter investigates the spatial organization of several estates by integrating modern topographic and historic map data. The results of this analysis suggest the conditions under which enslaved laborers cultivated basic foodstuffs and marketed surplus provisions.

Much of what we know archaeologically about the material realities of Caribbean plantation slavery is based on the interpretation of objects recovered from plantation village contexts. While a majority of those enslaved on plantations did in fact live in the village, not all did. In chapter 5, James A. Delle analyzes a previously unexamined material and spatial reality of Jamaican plantations: the existence and importance of extravillage localities in which people lived. Defined here as field houses, these structures were dispersed across the plantation landscape, located within agricultural fields and provision grounds. The material considered comes from an early nineteenth-century plantation known as Marshall’s Pen; excavations conducted on three field houses provide the data from which this interpretation is derived.

In chapter 6, Jane I. Seiter combines a program of landscape survey with a close analysis of maps and census records to reveal patterns of landscape development in St. Lucia very different from that on some other islands. Underneath the remains of vast sugar estates with their monumental architecture 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