Colonial Consequences: Results from the Archaeological Survey of Colonial Dominica

Brought into the foreground of anthropological concern through the works of Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, and others, the plantation is a spatial and economic category that is at once familiar and strange to archaeologies of environment, social complexity and power. Through a concentrated examination of one landscape, Soufriere, a settlement enclave on the island of Dominica, and its evolution between the 17th and 19th centuries, this panel revisits and destabilizes the plantation as a socio-ecological form and explores the unique and dynamic configurations of identity, power, and social relations that such a space engenders. In its material and aspirational emergence, the plantation landscape left behind a material record that enables participants to interrogate three questions. What makes a plantation a plantation? How are social and economic inequalities built into its landscape? How does the material record of enslaved workers speak about, with, or against the plantation as a concept and socio-ecological form? This panel builds on archaeological studies that looking at the evolution of colonial society, demonstrated how domestic economies are essential to understanding the political economy of island colonies, and how ordinary people were linked through regional and inter-regional interactions in ways not expected by colonial elites.