Long-term Survival of Indigenous Cultures in Haiti

Summary

The Espanola island was disrupted by the Spanish colonial power by massively forcing Indigenous people to work in the gold mines and to cultivate fields for producing foods for the Spaniards following the Encomienda system. The rise of European imperialism conducted to share the New World where the island of Espanola was officially occupied by the Spanish and French. Massive French investments into an agricultural industry lead to a large number of enslaved Africans being transported into the colony. Long before the division of the island into two possessions, Haiti experienced significant installations of French Buccaneers operating mainly along the North coast and Tortuga Island. It is from these interactions that developed the first perceptions of the French encounter in the cultural landscape. Behind the traditional discourse, there were exclusive social categories for African, Mulatos, and White people of the colony, by using primary archives as sources, as well as historical and ethnographic perspectives, this presentation proposes to examine contributions of free and enslaved Indigenous people in the colony of Saint-Domingue and their legacies of their cultural survival in the Haitian present-day society. In addition, it will address questions of future directions for cultural landscape studies related to longue-durée transformations

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22161