Settlement Survey of Newfield Plantation, Cat Island, Bahamas

Summary

In the wake of the American Revolution, exiled British Loyalists transformed the landscapes of the Bahama Islands. They developed sprawling plantation complexes on outlying islands where only small or transient settlements had once existed. A recent survey of Newfield Plantation, which was established on Cat Island by a member of a North Carolina Loyalist family, sheds light on the changes that occurred. Field investigation has yielded new data on the spatial organization and architectural elaboration of the early nineteenth-century estate, including housing for enslaved laborers. The findings speak to relationships embedded in both human ecology and dialectics of power. In turn, these relationships incorporated nested sets of boundaries and peripheries. The material remains at Newfield focus attention on the roles of spatial contexts, as well as the meanings of creolization in rural Bahamian lifeways before and after emancipation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• British Colonial Landscapes of the Outer Caribbean

Keywords

Spatial Coverage