The House-Yard Revisited: Domestic Landscapes of Enslaved People in Plantation Jamaica

Summary

Across the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean, the "slave village" has remained both a significant object and context for archaeological study of plantation slavery. Recent landscape perspectives have fostered new methods for seeing the material lives of enslaved people at the household and community scales. In recent years, however, little attention has been given the household infrastructure that extended beyond the house itself and articulated quarters into a village complex. The swept yard, or "house-yard," is the most significant of these spaces caught at the intersection of landscape and household archaeologies. Using recent findings from archaeological research at Good Hope Estate in Jamaica, this paper addresses the house-yard to: 1.) define new methods for uncovering archaeological "signatures" of yards at both large and small scales; and 2.) explore how enslaved people in Jamaica articulated, subdivided, and used these outdoor spaces to blur the domestic and social spheres of village life.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Perspectives on Plantation Archaeology in the Caribbean   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 247