The Value of Colonialism as a Model for Anglo-Caribbean Material Practices at Emancipation

Summary

Archaeologies of colonialism have presented models that draw out the complex political interactions of meaning making via material practices that take place at the intersection of daily lives between populations of colonized and the colonizer. Traditional approaches to the archaeology of slavery within the Anglo-Caribbean have tended to transpose these categories onto enslaved Africans and white settlers. The result is a tendency to emphasis meaning making through material in terms of disciplinary, imposed by whites, or resistive, traditional African, practices. This project seeks to problematize this classification, by exploring the socio-political dynamic that occurred within these societies in the decades leading to Emancipation in the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than resorting to a bifurcated model, this project attempts to draw out multiple arrangements of identities between the interests and identities of the planters, the enslaved, and metropolitans represented by missionaries. This more complex model suggests alternate meanings for materials traditionally associated with disciplinary practices using initial evidence derived from a village site associated with a Barbadian sugar estate.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Breaking Boundaries: Exploring Colonialism in the Modern World and Beyond

Keywords

Spatial Coverage