Portuguese Wine, an Old Spanish Town, and a New British Colony: Cosmopolitanism and Consumption in St. Augustine, Florida

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

British Florida was a short-lived colonial enterprise bound up in global conflicts from 1763 to 1784. While brief, it offers a striking opportunity to engage in a comparative colonial archaeology when considering the port town of St. Augustine’s long Spanish occupation dating back to 1565. Concepts such as creolization and cosmopolitanism have been used to describe Spanish St. Augustine, but research on British Florida has focused on the implementation of a plantation society amid political turmoil of the Revolutionary Era. Consumption, as a cultural practice, allows comparison of these two periods of occupation beyond solely a political framework. Material culture such as ceramics can demarcate the transition to British occupation in the city’s archaeological record. At the same time, the evidence for consumed substances including Portuguese and Spanish wines by colonial elites also challenges preconceptions of an insular “British Atlantic” world of goods in the 18th century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow