Destabilizing the Planters Prospect: The Embedded Landscapes of White Creole Masculinity at an 18th-Century Plantation House in Montserrat, West Indies

Summary

At the close of the 18th century, a planter’s dwelling overlooking the Caribbean Sea on the northwest coast of Montserrat was destroyed by fire, and never reoccupied. Archaeological excavations yielded an intimate portrait of the domesticity of the British Empire materialized in fragments of everyday life. Little Bay was a small-scale sugar plantation with a physical landscape that conformed to the logic of sugar production—planting fields, sugar works, and the dwellings of the laboring enslaved. The location of the planter's dwelling, atop a high promontory, achieved the "planters ideal", allowing for the simultaneous surveillance of the sugar works and the plantation's enslaved reinforcing the social hierarchy and control of the resident planter. The archaeology of Little Bay, bounded by context and historical contingency, provides a means to tease out the situational aspects of white Creole masculinity revealing the intersectional and relational axes of whiteness and Creole social identity that problematize the hegemonic masculine narrative inscribed in the plantation landscape. Examining the planter's house, and artifacts of hospitality and dress, this paper will explore the multi-relational entanglements of masculine social discourse embedded within the Little Bay Plantation landscape.

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): 21781