In the Shadow of Sugar: Dwelling in the Post-Emancipation Era, Montserrat

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Archaeological scholarship on Afro-Caribbean experiences in the Lesser Antilles has increasingly focused on the economic and social conditions of the post-emancipation period. This paper discusses material data collected from a plantation complex once containing a late 19th- to 20th-century village that supplied labor to the citrus lime industry on Montserrat. Excavated material evidence offers insight into the labor activities, commodity exchange, and consumption practices of free Afro-Caribbean individuals. By integrating archival data, the assemblage articulates how individuals may have negotiated shifting social relations, particularly in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the material consequences associated with the citrus lime industry. These materials provide a basis for interrogating how the new industry came to transform economic infrastructure after emancipation and how this shift manifested itself physically for the island’s inhabitants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2020 SHA General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1020