Colonial Encounters on the Caribbean Frontier: Archaeology at LaSoye, Dominica

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Colonial Encounters on the Caribbean Frontier: Archaeology at LaSoye, Dominica," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria exposed evidence of a colonial-era settlement on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Subsequent testing and excavation suggest that the site (LaSoye) was established as an informal European trading complex as early as the 16thcentury, which was then abandoned in the early 18th century, and subsequently re-occupied by the French in the 1740s. Until the late 18th century, Dominica was one of few Caribbean territories controlled by the Kalinago, the Indigenous inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles at the time of contact.This session presents ongoing archaeological, geophysical, and paleoenvironmental research at LaSoye aimed to characterize the nature of the relationship between the ancestral Kalinago and the European settlers, and to examine the political, economic, and socioecological realities of an informal trading encampment on the periphery of European colonialism in the Caribbean.