Blue Caribbean: A Possible Indigo Plantation, Great Camanoe Island, British Virgin Islands

Summary

Indigo was a major cash crop in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, but it has received less study than sugar. Though similar in many ways, requiring intensive cultivation and dangerous and difficult processing (accomplished by enslaved Africans), indigo required less capital outlay and grew in more marginal soils. Therefore it was a transitional crop and was popular in poorer areas. Indigo also held symbolic, spiritual, and practical importance to many African groups, and its production and use was well-established throughout West Africa before the slave trade. African expertise was applied to Caribbean indigo works and African peoples must have had their own perspectives on this process, which would have continued to hold meaning despite enslavement. This paper will relate initial survey and excavation work planned for summer 2013 on what may be the remains of one indigo plantation located on a small ‘Out Island’ of the British Virgin Islands, Great Camanoe.

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-6,09