Caribbean (Other Keyword)
26-50 (87 Records)
The eastern Caribbean islands of Barbados and Martinique, formerly British and French colonies, early developed into lucrative sugar-producing territories. Despite the harsh labor demands of plantation slavery on both islands, during their free time, particularly over the weekends, slaves participated in insular domestic economies. This involved activities (e.g., small-scale farming, fishing, collecting wild foods and animals, craft production) whose products were consumed by households or...
Environmental Archaeology in the Caribbean Islands: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Past Human-Environment Dynamics across Time and Space (2016)
Environmental Archaeology is a diverse field that focuses on the inherent relationships between past people and the physical environments in which they lived. Archaeologists employ traces of past human behavior and cultural practices in their macro-, micro-, geo- and biochemical forms to study past environmental conditions as well as human activities that directly or indirectly involved or impacted the environment. In the Caribbean islands, archaeologists employ a diversity of analytical...
Evaluating the Brass Pin Wreck as a Cultural and Biological Resource Within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (2022)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Brass Pin Wreck, located with the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS), is representative of a 19th century composite hulled sailing vessel. This site is known by its numerous bronze pin hull fasteners and its main feature, a large iron mast. In May 2021, Indiana University’s Center for Underwater Science sent a team of divers to survey the site for the first time...
Examining the Religious Dynamics of the Columbian Exchange: Islands of Belief and Conversion (2017)
The major moments of cultural exchange in global accounts of encounter have happened across the oceans and therefore island communities have often been first to experience contact and shape the nature of this encounter. This is certainly the case in the Caribbean where the island Taino were the first to encounter Europeans in the New World. The archaeology of Mona Island provides insights into both the origins of indigenous Taíno identities and religious communities, and the processes of...
Exchange and Interaction in the Caribbean: The View from Two Collections of the Smithsonian (2015)
Recent research in the Caribbean has produced strong evidence of long distance interaction throughout the Circum-Caribbean region, including possible direct exchange between Central America and the Greater Antilles across the Caribbean Sea. A recent casual survey of the Caribbean collections in the Smtihsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History has identified two objects that may add information on this topic. The first one is a three-pointer...
Exploring Material Change on Contemporary Pre- and Post-Emancipation Sites in the US and Caribbean. (2018)
In the British Caribbean, archaeologists have documented notable shifts in material culture after emancipation in 1834. Similar diversity and richness in material culture have been observed but not quantified on nineteenth-century sites of slavery in the United States. We compare artifact assemblages from contemporary post-emancipation sites from Morne Patat (Dominica) and Seville (Jamaica) with pre-emancipation sites from The Hermitage. We highlight differences in how formerly enslaved...
Females in Arecibo, Puerto Rico in 1910. (2018)
This research concentrates on reconstructing the identity and roles of females living in the city of Arecibo, Puerto Rico in the early 20th century. Using data from the 1910’s Puerto Rico census as primary source, I intend to identify the jobs and professions reported for the arecibeñas (female from Arecibo) living in urban blocks close to the main city square. The documentation consulted also provides information on their age, marital status, and family role. The objective of this investigation...
From Borinquen to Barbados: A Caribbean Cave Art Ritual Complex (2015)
Caribbean archaeology has provided us with evidence of a cultural mosaic that united diverse ecologies, ideologies and identities in sophisticated networks of art and ritual. Caves and cave art were fundamental to these networks. This paper outlines a complex of cave-related ritual activity across the Antilles, supported by art-historical, archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence. This proposed "Cave Art Ritual Complex" may turn out to have far-reaching implications for issues of cultural...
From Sea to Shining Sea: The Influence of Bill Dickinson’s Pacific Island Ceramic Petrography on Caribbean Research (2015)
Bill Dickinson’s research in the Pacific is widely known and considered to be one of the most exemplary cases of transdisciplinary research between archaeologists and the geosciences. The collaborative effort cultivated between Dickinson and the archaeological community over the last 50 years has led to new ways of understanding how and when peoples colonized islands, and the exchange systems that developed through time, among other important issues. One of the most significant outcomes of these...
Gazing Upward: New Directions at Betty's Hope Plantation, Antigua, West Indies (2015)
Plantation archaeology in the Caribbean region has been grappling with the complexities of plantation life through studying asymmetrical power relationships, spatial organization, and other important avenues of research. As there is no one "size fits all," this provides an opportunity to explore new approaches and methodologies in plantation research. For my presentation, I propose that Betty’s Hope—a 300-year-old sugar estate located on the island of Antigua—serves as a laboratory to test new...
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 Archaeology of Event and Process on Plantations in Grand Bay, Commonwealth of Dominica (2013)
Plantations in Grand Bay in southeastern Dominica have been venues for periodic episodes of resistance and rebellion, most recently in 1974, which were recorded in colonial archives because of the reporting and investigating of these events. While in this venue the perspective provided by the archive lends itself to the reporting of a series of events, archaeology at plantations in Grand Bay is more amenable to the study of long term processes such as the manipulation of space as a means of...
A House, a Pistol, China, and a Clock: The Articulation of White Masculinity and the Cult of Sensibility in 18th-Century Montserrat, West Indies (2013)
A modest plantation house overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northwestern coast of Montserrat burned in the late 18th-century. The path charted by the fire was fortunately uneven and has provided us with an archaeologically intimate portrait of the domesticity of empire—from table settings to personal adornment to furniture. The composition of the household is as of yet unknown, however. There are traces of enslaved Africans, and a wealthy British male well versed in the aesthetics of...
Interpreting Slavery from Urban Spaces: African Diaspora Archaeology and the Christiansted National Historic Site (2016)
The Christiansted National Historic Site in the US Virgin Islands has served as a landmark site documenting the history of African Diaspora and Danish occupation in St. Croix from 1733-1917. Three archaeological projects surrounding the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse have uncovered a wealth of cultural resources that have lasting implications for the largely Afro-Caribbean descendent Crucian community and for future interpretations of urban slavery in Caribbean contexts....
Into the mind of an undergrad: personal experience, training and archaeology (2015)
Only in exceptional moments can we explore the thoughts of others. Community archaeology projects, together with the ethical practice of the discipline, foster communication between the academia and the communities. Being part of one of these projects as a research assistant has given me the opportunity of interacting with people of diverse backgrounds, and of learning about their concerns and interests towards archaeology and their historical and cultural heritage. This experience has taught me...
Islands as gardens: plant translocations by Caribbean Indians as a dynamic and multiscalar form of cultural niche construction, with emphasis on Puerto Rico and the evidence for psychoactive/ritual plant use. (2016)
I consider pre-European plant introductions of exotic fruit trees and other useful plants as a multi-faceted reflection of indigenous plant use, culminating a mosaic of vegetative components in a constructed environment. I focus in particular on the plant constituents of the cajoba ritual complex, drawing especially on recent data from Tibes and Jácana (Puerto Rico), along with relevant ethnographic records from mainland South America that describe ethnobotanical practices associated with...
Kingston Harbor and the Burgeoning Landscape of World War (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Military Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean: Studies of Colonialism, Globalization, and Multicultural Communities" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Nineteenth-century upgrades in naval technology required reinvestment in the defenses of overseas colonies as European nation-states intensified global trade. Paralleling these strategic reallocations of political and economic resources in the context of growing...
Land use and evolution of Castillo San Felipe del Morro's Esplanade (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Military Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean: Studies of Colonialism, Globalization, and Multicultural Communities" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Construction of Castillo San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico began in 1539 and completed by the end of the eighteenth century. This massive fortification, located on the northwestern side of the islet, safeguards the entrance to the bay, and still...
Lead and Tallow: Using Navigational Charts to Assess Historic Bathymetry (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Nuts and Bolts of Ships: The J. Richard Steffy Ship Reconstruction Laboratory and the future of the archaeology of Shipbuilding" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. One of the factors determining the historic success or failure of centers of maritime commerce is the ease of navigation into and out of the associated harbours. However, due to tidal action, weather events, or human intervention, bathymetric...
Lesser Antillean Rock Art of the Caribbean: A Regional Perspective (2015)
Dubelar's 1995 compendium of rock art sites including sketches and photographs of the petroglyphs from the Lesser Antilles remains a critical resource for the study of the region's prehistoric images. The work has been supplemented in recent years with additional documentation efforts of known and newly discovered sites. The focus of this paper is on the characterization of Lesser Antillean rock art by detailing site and image distributional patterns across the arc of various islands. The Hofman...
Liquid Power: An archaeological excavation of an Antiguan rum distillery. (2016)
Rum was an important social and economic catalyst during the 17th-20th centuries, impacting all strata of society from the lowest slaves to the highest echelons of British society. During the 18th and 19th centuries rum developed from a waste product into highly desirable merchandise that was used as a social lubrication to ease tension while buying and selling slaves. This paper will discuss the archaeological excavations undertaken at the Betty’s Hope rum distillery in Antigua, one of the...
Lowcountry Urban Landscapes in the Greater British Caribbean (2018)
Archaeologists and architectural historians have long argued that Charleston’s Town Houses and urban landscapes were social stages for the Lowcountry’s gentry classes. But beyond their roles as socio-cultural theaters, cities and town played myriad economic, symbolic, and defensive roles in early modern colonial society. The challenge is understanding the intersection of these interpretive themes as realized through material cultural and the built environment. To begin to formulate more...
Military and Commercial use of Fort Amsterdam, Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Military Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean: Studies of Colonialism, Globalization, and Multicultural Communities" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fort Amsterdam was a small military and commercial fort on the west coast of the Dutch island of Sint Eustatius in the northern Lesser Antilles. The fort’s primary purpose was to protect Oranje Bay, where ships anchored to bring goods to the Lower Town...
Monitoring on Main Street: Archaeological Monitoring in the Charlotte Amalie Historic District in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Islands of Time (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 2016 to 2019, archaeological monitoring was performed within the Charlotte Amalie Historic District in conjunction with the Main Street Enhancement Project, an infrastructural project in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. Extended monitoring and data recovery resulted in the discovery of a range of features and intact deposits associated...
More than a Supply Stop: The Maima Village Before and After Columbus (2015)
In the winter of 1503-04, Christopher Columbus was marooned and provisioned by the Taino village of Maima located on the north central coast of Jamaica. What we know about the Taino of this village remains what was written in the accounts of those marooned Spanish explorers. After the year spent in this village the Spanish returned to the area and founded the settlement of Sevilla la Nueva, resulting in the people of Maima becoming victims of forced labor, conversion and disease. What is...