Housing and Living areas of the Enslaved and Free Servants at the Magens House Compound, St. Thomas

Summary

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the enslaved represented sixty-two percent of the urban population on the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies. While St. Thomas never held slave populations comparable to the other colonial empires in the Caribbean, it was an extremely important transshipment hub for the Caribbean and beyond. Slavery within the urban port setting of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas differed radically from the rural plantations, presenting the enslaved within the city economic opportunities and social negotiations not afforded to their rural counterparts. Though only a small number of slaves resided at the Magens House Compound, their impact appears briefly in the tax records and more substantially in the material record via artifact assemblages associated with the outbuildings and evidence of local craft industry participation on site. A microhistorical perspective will explore how the enslaved at the Magens House directly shaped their own spaces within and across a tightly controlled urban compound.

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