Jamaica (Other Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
Christianity anchored the material practices and social institutions of the Spanish settlers in the New World and while Christian friars undoubted arrived in Jamaica with the initial group of settlers in 1509, the Jamaican abbacy was not formally founded until 1515. The ecclesiastical authorities used temporary thatch and wood structures for worship at the capital of Sevilla la Nueva until funds were provided for the construction of a stone church in 1524. The abbey however, was not quite...
Constructing Space and Community within Landscapes of Slavery in Early 19th c. Jamaica (2016)
While household artifact analyses contribute a great deal to understanding the enslaved experience in the colonial Caribbean, where possible, landscape studies allow archaeologists to more completely reconstruct past built environments of slavery. Using a landscape approach, this paper investigates the use of space by the enslaved population at Marshall’s Pen, a 19th c. Jamaican coffee estate. Through landscape survey, we can better understand how enslaved men and women actively constructed...
Contact and Colonial Impact in Jamaica: Comparative Material Culture and Diet at Sevilla la Nueva and the Taino Village of Maima (2017)
In June 1503, Columbus and his two battered ships were run aground in the sheltered harbor of St. Anns Bay Jamaica, 1.4 kilometers from the Taino village of Maima. After spending a year marooned there, the Spanish left with the knowledge of the people and resources of the area. Six years later, in 1509, the Spanish returned to found the Jamaican colonial capital of Sevilla la Nueva. By the time Sevilla la Nueva was abandoned in 1534, Maima was deserted. Historical records kept by the colonists...
Developing Reproducible Methods for Defining and Evaluating Ceramic Compositional Groups Derived from NAA and LA-ICP-MS (2018)
The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), in collaboration with MURR and UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology, has analyzed the elemental composition of nearly 400 coarse earthenware sherds from eighteenth and early nineteenth century plantation contexts from Jamaica. All of the sherds were analyzed using Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), while nearly forty percent of these same sherds were analyzed via laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry...
"A Glittering Speculation": Archaeology of Jamaica’s First Coffee Boom, 1790–1806 (2018)
In the late 18th century, the British colony of Jamaica entered the first of its several boom periods in coffee production. A highly addictive product that was at the time primarily a luxury good for a small domestic market, overproduction on the island resulted in attempts by the coffee industry to expand their markets in Great Britain and the European continent to the middle and working classes. Meanwhile, the rush to get coffee to the market resulted in a rapid expansion in the number and...
Life and Death Inside and Outside the Village of Marshall's Pen (2013)
Established in 1812, Marshall’s Pen was a coffee estate owned by the former governor of Jamaica, Alexander Lindsay, the 6th Earl of Balcarres. This paper will consider recent archaeological investigations at Marshall’s Pen, concentrating specifically on the settlement pattern of enslaved housing both in the central village on the estate, and four satellite settlements dispersed amongst the provision grounds worked by the enslaved. In addition to reviewing the settlement pattern of the living,...
Plantation Life Beyond the Village: Examining Evidence for Residence in Provision Grounds (2016)
The archaeology of the enslaved experience on Caribbean plantations has traditionally focused on life in the plantation village. These spaces, often crowded and providing little privacy, were but one place on the plantation landscape inhabited by enslaved workers. As has long been known, in the British West Indies under slavery, workers were required to grow their own food to supplement the mostly meager rations provided sporadically by plantation managers. The small farms tended by the...
"This Coffee Only Succeeds when the Wood is Cleared and Burned off": Slavery, Agricultural Practice, and Deforestation in 19th Century Jamaica (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the opening decades of the 19th century, Jamaica experienced its first coffee boom. As planters raced to create productive plantations in the eastern and central highlands of the island, they employed gangs of enslaved laborers to clear cut an untold number of acres of old...
Zooarchaeological Evidence of Dietary Impacts from Contact at Maima, Jamaica (2016)
Recent field research at the Taino village of Maima on the north coast of Jamaica has revealed a complex late prehistoric and contact era village settlement. Occupied during the late prehistoric era, Maima was impacted by Columbus and his crew when they were stranded on the island for a year in 1503. After that initial contact, the villagers were forced into labour at the nearby Spanish settlement of Sevilla la Nueva. Faunal evidence, including shell and vertebrate bone, show that the impact...