The Historic House Yard Landscapes of St. Kitts’ Southeast Peninsula Plantations

Summary

Like most of the Leeward Islands, St. Kitts' historic economy was powered by sugar cultivation. Enslaved Africans and ultimately freedmen were the labor source in the sugar fields and from the late seventeenth century onward enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans 15 to 1. By the early nineteenth century there were over 100 known slave villages across the island. Using data from three investigated plantation sites from St. Kitts’ southeast peninsula, the spatial arrangement of the enslaved African villages and house yards are compared. At a macroscale, enslaved Africans took advantage of and manipulated the natural landscape in each village’s spatial arrangement. A close examination of one village shows how enslaved Africans organized their activity areas to shield themselves from the overseer as well as other village members. Diachronic changes and intra-village differences in housing types are also explored.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Built Environments of Enslaved Experience in the Caribbean

Keywords

Spatial Coverage