Test Excavations at the African Village of Wallblake Estate, Anguilla

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2017, archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate on Anguilla, B.W.I., to examine the plantation landscape and the major activity areas of the estate. The research project is focused on understanding the development of African-Anguillan culture from its origins in the boom and bust plantation economies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The research in 2017 identified the location of the African village and excavated a small sample of materials from it to compare to samples excavated at both the extant main house and kitchen. In summer 2018, the project continued the archaeological test excavations. The primary goal of the fieldwork was to identify the locations of houses occupied by enslaved African or African-descended people working at the plantation and the associated trash and other archaeological deposits they left behind. A grid of shovel tests were excavated over the village area which identified six artifact concentrations, three of which have been tested so far with 1x1 meter excavation units. Analysis of the recovered artifacts along with their spatial distributions yielded insights on the ways of life of the enslaved African or African-descended population of the plantation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23226