The Great House and the Old Plate

Sean Devlin

The Great House and the Old Plate

Year: 2018

Summary

Archaeological interpretations of consumption have long recognized its role in the construction of social identities and in the furtherance of social goals. While much of the historical archaeology of Jamaica, and indeed the Caribbean more broadly, has focused on exploring the consumption choices of enslaved Africans and African descendants, similar studies of archaeologically recovered planter patterns have not received as much attention. Yet, as archaeologies of whiteness are beginning to demonstrate, white identities are equally constructed within these same milieu. By analyzing the consumptive patterns of the planter class, we may be able to mark their deployment of race and class through material of everyday practices in the furtherance of their own social goals. This paper develops evidence recovered from a possible domestic midden associated with a Jamaican sugar plantation great house occupied in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth century.