The Relational Landscape of Plantation Slavery: An Archaeological Survey of Enslaved Life at Good Hope Estate, Trelawny, Jamaica

Summary

The enslaved community is often treated as a homogenous group – living, eating, dressing, buying, selling, and dwelling in the same way. This imposition of sameness fails to recognize the differential experience of enslaved laborers, and different means of agency existing within divided conditions of enslavement. This paper surveys the findings of recent archaeological investigations of the slave village of Good Hope estate, an 18th/early-19th-century sugar plantation in Trelawny, Jamaica. Home to 400 to 500 enslaved laborers at any one time between 1766 and 1838, the discovery and excavation of the village site provides insights into the differential lives and 'dwelling' practices of an enslaved community, and the active ways in which they manipulated the conditions of enslavement. As a case study of the DAACS Research Consortium, this paper further addresses the experiences of remote cataloguing into DAACS from the field, and the advantages of comparative data-recovery for this research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• A Progress Report on the DAACS Research Consortium

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 424