Rethinking the Slave Village: A New Perspective on Slave Housing in Early 19th Century Jamaica

Summary

Much of what we know archaeologically about the material realities of enslavement in the Caribbean is based on the analysis of material culture recovered from concentrated settlements generally referred to in the literature as ‘slave villages.’ In this paper, I demonstrate through the analysis of archival, cartographic, and archaeological evidence that residence patterns on Jamaican plantations were more dispersed and complex than the slave village model has previously assumed. While it has been well known that domestics tended to live in or about the great houses and overseers quarters on estates, this analysis demonstrates that a surprising number of people lived in dispersed settlements located in provision grounds, field houses, and other areas not typically defined as village spaces on estate maps and other traditional sources of information used by archaeologists to model plantation settlement patterns.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• Historical Archaeology in the Caribbean: New Directions and Current Perspectives

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-6,03