The Role of Caves and Gullies in the Creation of Community Networks Among Enslaved Workers in Barbados

Summary

While the archaeology of plantation slave villages demonstrates planter control, the spaces in between these sites offer information from places where the reach of the planter was most minimal. Archaeological investigations in the caves and gullies that run through the plantation lands at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation in St. Peter, Barbados offer insights into the social practices that enslaved workers pursued. The gully between St. Nicholas Abbey and the modern-day village of Moore Hill contains a series of caves, many of which possess a large amount of material culture, including ceramics and black bottle glass. These caves, as liminal spaces on the landscape between adjoining plantations, appear to have served as meeting areas for enslaved and later free workers from surrounding estates. The privacy these spaces afforded allowed greater mobility between villages and encouraged activities that were not permitted in the public sphere of white authority. Caves and gullies are thus viewed as highly fluid places that physically and socially connected many of the communities in the plantation-dominated landscape of Barbados.

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-6,16