St. Patrick’s Day and Sugar Plantations:  Articulating Landscape Archaeology with Conceptions of Montserrat’s Historical Narratives and Cultural Geography

Summary

Montserrat’s nickname, "the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean", points to the island’s 17th-century Irish connection, sustained today by the annual national commemoration of a failed St. Patrick’s Day uprising by African slaves in 1768. Rooted in this event, the Anglo-Irish narrative is foregrounded in many historical studies of Montserrat’s plantations, slavery, geography, and heritage.  Despite the power of this narrative in shaping Montserratian cultural identity, the archaeological record offers few explicit links to Irish material culture or settlements in the plantation era.  Archaeological evidence gathered from systematic landscape survey and mapping is poised to tell a more diverse story about island-wide socio-cultural and economic networks.  Focusing on the layout of space and material culture consumption across multiple plantation sites, we consider how a landscape approach permits broader comparisons and raises questions about how intra-island networks changed in response to the variable social and economic conditions between ca.1750 and 1840. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• British Caribbean Plantations (1750-1840): Cross Disciplinary Dialogues Among Historians and Historical Archaeologists   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 309