Military and Commercial use of Fort Amsterdam, Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean

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.

Fort Amsterdam 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 island administrators believed military action would do more harm than good to the island’s commercial ventures. Archaeological investigations focused on understanding how the fort articulated with adjacent commercial warehouses and a nearby cemetery. The recovered materials generally date from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1830s and reflect the fort’s military occupations and relationships with the nearby warehouses.

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 716