The Multicultural Caribbean and Its Overlooked Histories

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Lenik.

The Catholic parishes that were established as units of ecclesiastical jurisdiction are among the range of institutions, including chartered companies, missions, and military installations, deployed by nation-states in the Americas to exert control over the daily lives of African, European, and indigenous peoples. As administrative units in the colonization of newly acquired territories in the Caribbean islands, parishes introduced administrative boundaries and religious personnel who intended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georgia Fox.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Reifschneider.

This paper explores the relationship between Danish centrally administered healthcare policy and enslaved populations on the island of St. Croix, US Virgin Islands during the nineteenth century. During the period between 1803 and 1848, a series of plantation medical hospitals were constructed on the island in order to provide medical services to enslaved individuals in an effort to reduce mortality and morbidity rates. This paper will address the preliminary archaeological fieldwork stages of my...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David R. Watters.

Three and a half decades have passed since the author first observed the historic structures of Barbuda, a low-lying limestone island in the northern Lesser Antilles.  Natural and cultural processes, ranging from hurricanes to stone-robbing, have transformed these buildings, resulting in their structural integrity being compromised.  In many cases, architectural features that were observed as recently as twenty years ago no longer are extant because of the degree of deterioration.  Preserving...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Godbout.

This paper examines practices of hospitality and convivial dining at the Betty’s Hope plantation, Antigua, between 1783 and 1904. Dinner parties are codified social gatherings that gained popularity in Britain during the eighteenth century, in the context of class emulation and the emergence of consumerism.  Dinner parties figure consistently in accounts of plantation life in the Caribbean, whether in the often satirical and deprecating written accounts of contemporary visitors, or in common...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Tutchener.

In 1732, at the height of the slave trade on St. Eustatius in the Caribbean, the Dutch shipped more than 2,700 people from Africa, making the island integral to the Second West India Trading Company’s influence in the Caribbean. This site consists of a series of 10 dry built stonewalls that run down a large valley on the side of the Quill (602m in height) which is a dormant volcano located within a National Park of the same name. The walls were built either to assist in the minimization of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Waters.

This paper explores the concept of fear as a useful theoretical abstraction to help understand the social anxiety of life on the island of Antigua during the eighteenth century.  Fear comes from a tripartite of internal stress caused by the large enslaved population on the island, external stress coming from the constant threat of invasion by other colonial powers in the Caribbean as well as the ever present danger of dying from the withering effects of the tropics—disease.  Archaeologically,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shea Henry.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis K Ohman.

Betty’s Hope plantation operated continuously for nearly 300 years during the colonial period in Antigua, West Indies. Since 2007, excavations have been conducted on several parts of the site including the Great House, Service Quarters, and Still House contexts. Zooarchaeological analyses have begun to untangle the foodways patterns in daily life at Betty’s Hope, particularly the incorporation of local resources with specific class-based patterns despite the general disdain the English...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Goudge.

A great deal of research has been undertaken on the slave trade, sugar and the African diaspora, however, the impact of rum has garnered little attention from scholars.  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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine A. Gunter. Benjamin Kirby.

During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enslaved African and poor white potters produced redware vessels in eastern parishes across the British Caribbean Island of Barbados. While potters predominantly catered to the burgeoning Barbadian sugar industry, they also crafted domestic vessel forms that emerged as key fixtures in local markets. Despite their economic impact, Barbadian potters are archaeologically invisible: The utilitarian wares they produced are nearly identical to...