How can evolutionary models and archaeological evidence help us understand change in the household economies of slave villages on Nevis and Kitts?

Summary

Early-modern slave village sites in the eastern Caribbean are littered with both locally-made "Afro-Caribbean" and imported European ceramics. Archaeologists have focused on the former as an expression of identity, while ignoring copious variation in time and space in both classes of ceramics and the causal mechanisms that might be responsible for it. This paper embeds evolutionary models of costly signaling and markets in a larger multi-level selection framework to offer a tentative explanation for ubiquitous household production of Afro-Caribbean ceramics and a previously unrecognized sudden increase in the abundance of imported ceramics in the late-eighteenth century on Nevis and St Kitts. The evidence is drawn from recent STP surveys on slave village sites and neutron activation analysis of "Afro-Caribbean" sherds. The models show how archaeological patterns can be traced to the disruption of food imports from North America, which caused mass mortality among enslaved people and led governing coalitions of slave owners to introduce new institutions from Jamaica to support independent food production by the enslaved and their participation in state-supported market exchange.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Evolutionary Archaeologies: New Approaches, Methods, and Empirical Sufficiency

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