Kingston Harbor and the Burgeoning Landscape of World War

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Military Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean: Studies of Colonialism, Globalization, and Multicultural Communities" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Nineteenth-century upgrades in naval technology required reinvestment in the defenses of overseas colonies as European nation-states intensified global trade. Paralleling these strategic reallocations of political and economic resources in the context of growing nationalism was the installation of state-of-the-art weaponry and reallocation of existing defenses, necessitating shifts in relations of space and power among European officers and colonial soldiers and local militia who maintained these installations. At Kingston Harbor in the 1880s, the British War Office built or modified four batteries to defend this vital cog in the global economy on the south coast of Jamaica. While an earlier study at Rocky Point Battery examined how African-Jamaican militia could subvert rigid military order via personal adornment and bodily modification, this paper combines archaeology, drone survey, and documents to analyze the spatial logic of the harbor batteries in making war and defining the state.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Military Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean: Studies of Colonialism, Globalization, and Multicultural Communities   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 282