Community Entanglements: Archaeology, Heritage, and Community Partnership at the Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies

Summary

Tourism has replaced sugar as the Caribbean’s economic engine. The ruins of sugar mills incorporated into resorts create cultural experiences rooted in romanticized notions of colonialism. Paradoxically the labor structure of this externally driven model replicates the racial, economic, and social divisions of the plantation structure. Promoted as "sustainable," the recent shift to heritage tourism while advantageous to archaeology is rife with the colonizing potential of Eurocentric tourism and interpretive strategies that trap the present in the historical narrative of sugar and enslavement. This paper discusses the challenges and successes associated with the implementation of an AIA Site Preservation Grant to further develop in association with the Montserrat National Trust and the new national museum, a community based archaeological, interpretative, and educational program at Little Bay Plantation, a small-scale 18th-century Montserratian sugar plantation situated within a large-scale capital redevelopment project. Ultimately good and necessary, this paper explores the welter and complexity of community entanglements associated with the efforts of the Little Bay project to create a sustainable community partnership rooted in collaborative research and interpretation.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeologies by Community Mandate: Practicing Collaborative and Community-Engaged Research

Keywords

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