Caribbean (Other Keyword)
26-50 (123 Records)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Shirley Heights (1791-1854) was a military fort located on the former British Caribbean colony of Antigua, constructed during a period of rising tensions from French invasions of British territories and increased resistance of enslaved Africans. Excavations conducted at the Blockhouse of Shirley Heights in 2018 sought to add to the growing body of research on Antiguan military sites...
Circulating Ceramics in the Eighteenth Century (2016)
Purpose of this paper is to examine our ability to model trade connections through the use of ceramics and quantitative methods. Ceramic collections from various eighteenth Caribbean sites will be examined through a statistical model for inter-island trade. I shall argue that consumptive patterns are knowable and testable through the archaeological record. Finally, the connections developed from the importation of various goods, such as ceramics, provide opportunities to test ideas about...
The Colony and the City: Contemporary Caribbean Landscapes in Transatlantic Context (2016)
Following Raymond Williams’ critical analysis of the relationship between the English countryside and its urban counterpart in The Country and the City (1973), this paper expands Williams’ analysis to incorporate the entanglements of the colony, specifically the Caribbean post-colony of Barbados, and English urban centers. Despite studies of well-known historical relationships existing in terms of Atlantic world economics, there has been less discussion of the repercussions of...
Comparative analysis of ceramic assemblages from 18th century Caribbean enslaved populations (2015)
Multiple ceramic samples were type identified and analyzed for the use in a regional comparative analysis of enslaved populations. The sampled ceramics were obtained from multiple contexts collected from various Caribbean locations. The comparative analyses clarify social dynamics, prosperity, and sustainability within enslaved populations. Afro-Caribbean, colonial tradewares, and exotics were compared by quantifying frequency and present/absent along with the level of diversity in the local...
Conch Shells and Concrete: Differential Mortuary Treatment in Christiansted Cemetery, St. Croix, USVI (2022)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As part of the 2021 National Science Foundation funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates Exploring Globalization Through Archaeology site investigations of the St. Croix Leper Hospital (1888-1954), team members documented over 1200 graves in the Christiansted Cemetery. After identifying the names of hospital residents from census records (1890-1940) and the names of 240 individuals...
Constructing Public Architecture and Power on the Northern Coasts of Puerto Rico: The Archaeology of the Precontact Ceremonial Complex of Tierras Nuevas (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout Caribbean prehistory, the construction of public architecture in ceremonial contexts is linked to expressions of status and power over local communities and resources. The appearance of these features such as mounds and ballcourts (bateyes) are largely associated with the Early to Late Ceramic Period – broadly defined by long-distance cultural...
Cores and Peripheries: Betty’s Hope, A Synergy of Approaches to the Archaeology of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation (2015)
The Betty’s Hope Field Project has been ongoing for the last eight years, and comprises two components: ongoing research and the summer field school. AS a 300-year-old sugar plantation on Antigua, Betty’s Hope offers a myriad of opportunities to explore plantation life and Caribbean archaeology. Within the theme of this year’s SHA conference on boundaries and peripheries, the paper will address some of the exciting new developments and directions our research is taking us, and how it relates...
The Cultural Landscape at Mount Plantation, Barbados: preliminary findings and future directions (2013)
As part of a wider project in Barbados and the UK, archival research, fieldwalking, and remote sensing have been carried out at Mount Plantation, Barbados. It was selected on its potential for two related research directions. First, to yield data related to the 17C transition to a sugar economy. Second, a study of created and transformed landscapes owned by the Lascelles family in Barbados and Yorkshire (UK). The archaeological investigation of Mount has the potential to yield significant...
The 'Curse of the Caribbean'? The Effects of Agency on the Efficiency of Sugar Plantations in St Vincent and the Grenadines, 1801-30 (2013)
This study estimates agency's impact on the efficiency of sugar plantations using a panel data set compiled from St Vincent and the Grenadines' crop accounts and slave registry returns. Previous work suggests that agency resulted from absenteeism and exerted a large, negative influence on estate efficiency. This contribution uses stochastic frontier models for panel data to estimate the impact of agency while controlling for crop mix, locational variables, and the size of the estate. Analysis...
Danish Colonial Health Policy and Practice on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands (2015)
During the period between 1803 and 1848, a series of medical hospitals were constructed on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands in order to provide medical services to enslaved individuals in an effort to reduce mortality and morbidity. My research seeks to interrogate how medical initiatives and treatments were implemented, contested, or received by various actors, including Danish colonial doctors and nurses, plantation health care providers, and enslaved individuals. This research will be...
Digging a Forgotten Archeological Sequence in Amazonia: 19th Century to Mid-20th Century and Beyond. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 19th century natural scientists interested in Amazon archaeology saw the region as having a long prehistoric sequence of early hunters, sedentary ceramic fisherpeople, farmers, and complex societies. Both South American scientists and institutions...
Diverse Dining: Post-Emancipation Foodways in Antigua, West Indies (2017)
The role of zooarchaeology and foodways in plantation archaeology has aided in teasing out the details of daily life and shifting sociocultural habits during the colonial period. Plantation archaeology has also had a distinct focus on the African diaspora communities. However, the post-Emancipation period complicates the narrative even further as new ethnic communities were brought or drawn to the new labor requirements of plantations at this time. Post-Emancipation Antigua saw an influx of...
The Domestic Economy of Plantation Slaves in Barbados and Martinique, mid-1600s to mid-1800s (2013)
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...
Don’t Forget about Me: The Role of “Minor” Fortifications in the Interpretation of Military Landscapes (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Military sites and spaces are of great interest to archaeologists, historians, and the public. They are significant for interpreting past events and understanding the lives of those who lived and labored there. The larger and grandiose military sites often become the primary focus of conservation and research efforts for their monumentality and their...
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...
Ethnoarchaeological study of pre-Hispanic boats in the lakes of Atitlán and Izabal, Guatemala (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Entre costas, ríos, lagos y manantiales: Arqueología subacuática en contextos prehispánicos en Latinoamérica y el Caribe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of the development of various pre-Hispanic populations in Guatemala has primarily focused on relationships established through land-based networks. This perspective has limited the understanding of a broader development in which bodies of water played a...
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...
Geochemical Impacts of Freshwater Submersion on Pre-Columbian Ceramics: A Case Study from Cueva Padre Nuestro, Dominican Republic (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Entre costas, ríos, lagos y manantiales: Arqueología subacuática en contextos prehispánicos en Latinoamérica y el Caribe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates the geochemical variation in archaeological ceramics from the freshwater submerged cavern site of Cueva Padre Nuestro in La Altagracia Province, Dominican Republic. We aim to determine whether significant geochemical differences exist between...