Archaeological Investigations of Fort Amsterdam, Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "POSTER Session 2: Linking Historic Documents and Background Research in Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Fort Amsterdam (ca. 1680s-1810s) was a small military and commercial fort on the west coast of the Dutch island of Sint Eustatius in the northern Lesser Antilles. The fort’s primary purpose was to protect Oranje Bay, where ships anchored to bring goods to the Lower Town warehouses, and from around 1724 to the 1740s served as a "slave depot" for the Dutch West Indies Company. The fort seldom saw military action as the island administrators believed fighting would do more harm than good to the island’s commercial ventures. Archaeological investigations in 2018 focused on discovering information relating to how the fort articulated with adjacent commercial warehouses and a nearby cemetery. The recovered materials generally date from the mid-eighteenth century to around 1810 and reflect the fort’s military occupations and relationships with the nearby warehouses.

Cite this Record

Archaeological Investigations of Fort Amsterdam, Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean. Todd H. Ahlman, Suzanne Sanders, Ashley H. McKeown, Fred van Keulen. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, St. Charles, MO. 2019 ( tDAR id: 449205)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 504