Caribbean (Geographic Keyword)
251-275 (537 Records)
Like most of the Leeward Islands, St. Kitts' historic economy was powered by sugar cultivation. Enslaved Africans and ultimately freedmen were the labor source in the sugar fields and from the late seventeenth century onward enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans 15 to 1. By the early nineteenth century there were over 100 known slave villages across the island. Using data from three investigated plantation sites from St. Kitts’ southeast peninsula, the spatial arrangement of the enslaved...
Historical and Archaeological Contexts for Zooarchaeological Analyses at Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts, West Indies (2018)
Research at Brimstone Hill Fortress (1690 to 1854) focuses on comparative studies of the eighteenth century lifeways of British soldiers and enslaved Africans. The St. Kitts colonial government and British Royal Engineers designed the fort, and enslaved and free Africans constructed and maintained it. Excavations in areas occupied by British Army officers, enlisted soldiers, and enslaved Africans have produced substantial faunal remains. Especially revealing is the use of imported and local...
Histories and Trajectories of Socio-Ecological Landscapes in the Lesser Antilles: Implications of Colonial Period Zooarchaeological Research (2016)
The arrival and colonization of the Caribbean by Europeans beginning in the 15th Century transformed the already dynamic landscapes of the region. To accommodate the slave-labor supported colonial plantation system and its orientation towards market exports, the region witnessed the introduction of exotic plants and animals, creating a ‘creolization’ of flora and fauna. In this paper, I discuss how environmental archaeology contributes to a nuanced and diachronic understanding of the...
History and Research Potential of the Hale Smith Collection from Castillo San Felipe del Morro, San Juan National Historic Site, National Park Service (2016)
This presentation reconstructs the history of the archaeological collection resulting from the 1961 excavations at the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico carried out by Dr. Hale Smith, from a collections management perspective. A chronological timeline of the field and laboratory work will allow understanding the type and amount of analyses that has been completed for this collection. Particular consideration is given to the current location of the artifacts, notes and...
The History of Archaeobotanical Research on the Island of Puerto Rico and Its Relationship with Notions of Poor Preservation of Macro-botanical Remains on Archaeological Contexts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research of macro-botanical remains in the Caribbean is scarce due to notions of poor preservation in tropical landscapes. This shifted archaeobotanical research towards the analysis of micro-botanical remains because these types of analysis have been reported as more successful for recovering data of subsistence practices in the Neotropics....
Housing and Living areas of the Enslaved and Free Servants at the Magens House Compound, St. Thomas (2016)
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the enslaved represented sixty-two percent of the urban population on the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies. While St. Thomas never held slave populations comparable to the other colonial empires in the Caribbean, it was an extremely important transshipment hub for the Caribbean and beyond. Slavery within the urban port setting of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas differed radically from the rural plantations, presenting the enslaved within the...
Housing Occupation and Constructing Race in Plantation Jamaica: A Comparative Archaeology between two Slave Villages at Good Hope Estate. (2016)
The “slave village” occupies an important place in Caribbean archaeology, though one in which the internal variation and dynamics of a village have yet to be thoroughly addressed. This has resulted in an essentialized picture of the "enslaved community” as a single entity. However, recent excavations at Good Hope estate, an 18th/19th-century sugar plantation in Jamaica, have demonstrated greater internal variation of experience, revealing that the plantation's enslaved community was divided...
How can evolutionary models and archaeological evidence help us understand change in the household economies of slave villages on Nevis and Kitts? (2016)
Early-modern slave village sites in the eastern Caribbean are littered with both locally-made "Afro-Caribbean" and imported European ceramics. Archaeologists have focused on the former as an expression of identity, while ignoring copious variation in time and space in both classes of ceramics and the causal mechanisms that might be responsible for it. This paper embeds evolutionary models of costly signaling and markets in a larger multi-level selection framework to offer a tentative explanation...
A Hundred Years of Human Migration in the Caribbean: Considering the Key Tipping Points of Cultural Transformation between AD1492 and AD1592 (2018)
This paper will review some of the ways in which unprecedented human migration and cultural encounter in the 15th and 16th century Caribbean is reflected in the transformative material exchanges made on Isla de Mona. Discoveries made during recent fieldwork on Isla de Mona will be used to illuminate and inform these thoughts by examining the dynamic ideological setting within which they are situated.
Hurricanes as Agents of Cultural Change: Integrating Paleotempestology and the Archaeological Record (2018)
Hurricanes are major climatological events with significant impacts in tropical and extra-tropical regions worldwide. Despite this, little research has been undertaken on the effects of hurricanes and other intense storms on prehistoric societies. New evidence from the field of paleotempestology—the study of past hurricane activity using geological proxy techniques, such as lagoon sediments and speleothems—is shedding light on how hurricanes varied over the Holocene in terms of frequency,...
The Icky Sticky: Foodways, Identity, and Isotopic Residue Analysis at La Soye, Dominica (2023)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As part of the La Soye research project, this poster explores the socioecological dynamics of the Kalinago people, European colonists, and island ecologies during the early-modern era. Through the GC-IRMS and starch analysis of a collection of earthenware potsherds, this paper reconstructs the dietary patterns of La Soye’s inhabitants. Preliminary data suggests that the inhabitants were...
Identifying Genogeographic Affiliation of Burials from an 18th Century Cemetery on Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 18th century, Sint Eustatius (Statia) was the home to colonial Europeans, including Dutch, British and French, as well as enslaved and freed individuals of African descent. This research explores the genogeographic...
Identity and Heritage: Moving beyond Twentieth-Century Archaeology in the Caribbean (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of archaeology in the Caribbean is deeply embedded in the colonialist and imperialist history of the region. For many years, archaeologists studied the area in a contentious manner, which in turn impacted the local research capacity for fields such as archaeology. The effects of colonialist and imperialist agendas that extended into the...
Illicit Landscapes and Illegal Economies in 19th century Southern Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines how peripheral landscapes, along the coast and cayes of Southern Belize, shaped the region’s early colonial period (AD 1544-1840). Specifically, who were the people who settled southern Belize and how did the economies and industries that formed around them critically impact both Spanish and...
Illuminating Haiti’s Royal Past: Advancing Analytics Through 3D Data Fusion of Terrestrial Surface Models and Subsurface Geophysical Data (2018)
Since 2015, the Milot Archaeological Project has conducted a series of archaeological explorations at the Royal Palace of Henry Christophe in the town of Milot in Northern Haiti. This site, called Sans-Souci, was a principal site of political authority in the short-lived Kingdom of Haiti (1811-1820) and is a UNESCO World Heritage site of paramount importance to national development strategies in Haiti. Working with the Institute Sauvegarder du Patrimoine Cultural (Haiti), the Bureau National...
The impacts of cattle introduction in Puerto Rican landscapes during the colonial period (2017)
In this presentation I examine the environmental impacts that cattle introduction had in Puerto Rico by combining geoarchaeological and ethnohistorical methods. During the sixteenth century hides became one of the most profitable commodities to be produced in the Caribbean. For the bigger islands of the Antilles, it has been reported that these early populations proliferated, leading to underground economies based upon their exploitation. Through the analysis of historical accounts and the...
In the Hunt for Mona Island Guano Miners: Archival Documentation in the General Archives of Puerto Rico (2018)
This paper presents initial archival research from the "Archivo General de Puerto Rico" (Puerto Rican General Archives) relating to C19th-20th guano extraction on Mona island in the Caribbean. This is part of a PhD project which examines the lives of guano miners through archaeology and historic archives. Guano as a manure was highly sought as a fertilizer during the nineteenth century for its high contents of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, nutrients needed for plant growth. It...
Incorporating "Otherness" to Archaeological Research. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much has been written about widening our research scopes to incorporate peripheral topics that include ethnicity, class, gender, age, and status. Although these past decades there has been significant progress, we should ask ourselves how can we impact and motivate students to address these issues. This presentation will demonstrate...
Indian Creek Revisited: The Use of Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) Soil Analysis to Characterize Areas Without Artifacts (2015)
This paper reports on a preliminary study assessing the applicability for pXRF analysis of soils within a Pre-Columbian context. The data generated for this discussion comes from the site of Indian Creek, Antigua; an Amerindian site bound by a series of middens forming a concentric ring around the perimeter of the site. This settlement is the result of over 1300 years of continuous occupation, before it was abandoned just prior to contact in the New World. Aside from the excavations conducted...
Indian Ethnic Complexity in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and Its Implications for the Study of European/Indian Contact During the Early Colonial Period (2018)
Scholarly interest utilizing archaeological and ethnohistorical studies to understand the genesis and development of Caribbean creole societies has grown in the last few years. Perspectives have shifted to emphasize the diversity of groups in the Caribbean during precolonial times, and how this continued into the colonial period as Europeans and Africans coalesced in the area. The conflictual aspect of this interaction whereby Europeans imposed a system of forced labor, along with drastic Indian...
Indians and Africans: Food, Ethnicity and Status in Early Colonial Cuba (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the first half of the sixteenth century the Spanish colonial project in the Greater Antilles was based on the intensive exploitation of Indians and Africans, who saw the transformation of all aspects of their existence, including the food issue. Using historical and archaeological data, this article...
Indigenous and Transcultural Implications in the "Seasoning" of Early 17th-Century Settlers of Barbados (2018)
The early 17th century settlement of Barbados is often projected as "Little England" and the settlers unidimensional as "Englishmen Transplanted" onto a rather blank slate of an abandoned island (Puckrain 1984, Gragg 2003). Current archaeological investigations of the initial period of colonial settlement on Barbados focusing on Trents Plantation, and the pre-sugar era (1627-1640s) project an all-together different picture. The archaeological and historical record projects a multivalent,...
Indigenous Migration, Diaspora, and Transculturation in Colonial Cuba (2015)
For nearly half a millennium, Cuba served as an outpost, key to the defence of the Spanish American empire, and one of the first centres for slavery in the colonial Americas. At the same time, Cuba also served the interests of various continental and isthmian American Amerindian groups and individuals, many who, from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, journeyed to the island colony voluntarily for trade, diplomacy, and refuge. At the same time, thousands were also transported...
Integrated Anthrosol Prospection at Betty’s Hope Historic Sugarcane Plantation, Antigua, British West Indies (2015)
Multi-elemental geochemical prospection of soils and sediments has become a highly useful technique for understanding past activity areas and the behaviors that produced them. However, this technique has limited interpretive potential, because it can only identify possible locations of different classes of activities. More importantly, there has been little research to evaluate the processes and elemental loadings that characterize different types of spaces. By studying known contexts and...
Internally Divided: An Archaeological Investigation of a Jamaican Slave Village, 1766 to 1838 (2015)
On the large-scale sugar plantations of the Caribbean, enslaved Africans were forced into dense communities on the scale of small urban townships. In many cases, the "slave village" site was allotted by the plantation owner, though the internal composition was largely left to the choices and dynamics of the enslaved community. This poster summarizes the findings from a recent archaeological survey of the slave village of Good Hope estate, an 18th/early-19th-century sugar plantation in northern...