Inhabited Islandscapes and Historical Ecosystem Dynamics: Power and Land in Barbuda

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Inhabited Islandscapes and Historical Ecosystem Dynamics: Power and Land in Barbuda," at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Power shapes and conditions social relations: who has or does not have access to it, what symbols showcase it, what activities are or are not acceptable, what is kept, and what is discarded. This session explores Barbuda as an inhabited space where plants, fortifications, and the scatter and accumulation patterns of modern garbage all show a relationship between people, the land, and the sea in the context of global dynamics that span well beyond the island. The presentations will share the results of the 2024 Field Season with the Barbuda Research Complex under the larger topic of landscapes of power. A closing discussion will analyze the 2024 projects in the context of the wider Indigenous and Historic archaeology of Barbuda and the northeastern Caribbean Archipelago.