Language Shift and Material Practice

Summary

The model of linguistic creolization had a particular impact on archaeological practice. Drawing inspiration from Sidney Mintz’s and Richard Price’s Birth of African American Culture (1992), archaeologists have been quick to recognize how they could use the concept to interpret material culture and relations of power. Indeed, the histories and processes associated with settler colonization in the Caribbean, including indigenous displacement, forced migration of Africans and the appropriation of land and labor of both made it untenable to employ strategies that equated culture, biology, and language. The model helped archaeologists imagine, if not analyze, a less static understanding of social, political, and economic boundaries that shaped the colonial past. In this paper I build on this scholarship to consider a longer term set of processes that shaped Dominica’s landscape in the early modern period and that continue to reverberate today. Specifically, I rely on linguistic and archaeological evidence to parse some of the historical threads and relations of power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20337