British Colonial Landscapes of the Outer Caribbean
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Shifting political fortunes in the Americas repeatedly forced the British Crown to implement strategies for managing its subject populations. These strategies pushed colonization to ever widening peripheries, transforming natural and cultural landscapes in novel ways. New settlements were established for the purposes of extracting resources, commanding trade, and expanding military authority. These ventures involved the negotiation of power relations between and among colonizers, indigenous societies, and enslaved Africans. Recent archaeological studies examine plantations, outposts, and other built environments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were peripheral, both geographically and economically, to the more profitable sugar colonies of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. These studies highlight the importance of the material record to understanding social dynamics and globalizing processes within the wider sphere of the Caribbean under British control.
Other Keywords
Plantations •
Heritage Management •
Colonization •
Slavery •
landscapes •
Bahamas •
Row Housing •
British Crown •
West Indies
Geographic Keywords
Caribbean
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-5 of 5)
- Documents (5)
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Discovery of Plantation Row Housing on Cat Island, Bahamas (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Multiunit housing for enslaved populations was introduced to estates in the West Indies at the dawn of the nineteenth century during the broader British movement to improve habitations of both free and unfree rural laborers. Planters attempted to counter abolitionist criticism by installing housing that incorporated new layouts and more durable materials. Material culture studies of plantations in the Bahamian archipelago, however, have long recognized an absence of row house architecture. This...
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Landscape of Royalization: An English Military Outpost on Roatán Island, Honduras (2016)
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During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English Crown competed with other European imperial powers for control over the land, labor, and materials of the Caribbean. The English Crown came to view the Caribbean as the geographical hub within which it would be able to obtain key resources and to challenge the rapidly growing power of the Spanish Empire. One of the most contentious ports in the western Caribbean was New Port Royal harbor on Roatán Island, Honduras, because of its...
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Landscapes of Slavery and Emancipation on Cat Island, Bahamas (2016)
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Although Bahamian plantation archaeology has witnessed considerable growth in the last three decades, no sites of the Loyalist period (c. 1783-1838) on Cat Island have hitherto been systematically studied. An ongoing interdisciplinary project aims to address this omission, and the resulting scholarship will contribute to the island’s first heritage management plan. Since its launch, the Cat Island Heritage Project has documented six Loyalist-era sites at the island's southern end. Among these is...
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Settlement Survey of Newfield Plantation, Cat Island, Bahamas (2016)
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In the wake of the American Revolution, exiled British Loyalists transformed the landscapes of the Bahama Islands. They developed sprawling plantation complexes on outlying islands where only small or transient settlements had once existed. A recent survey of Newfield Plantation, which was established on Cat Island by a member of a North Carolina Loyalist family, sheds light on the changes that occurred. Field investigation has yielded new data on the spatial organization and architectural...
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Visions of Colonial Landscapes: Through the Eyes of African Caribbean Communities (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The National Museum of The Bahamas/Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation (AMMC) is the agency designated to identify, manage and conserve tangible and intangible cultural resources throughout The Bahamas. The AMMC is in the process of developing a protocol model that will further enhance the identification and conservation of identified and yet to be identified archaeological sites. An essential component of the development of this process is the inclusion of members of each island...