Methodological Perspectives in the Search for Maroon Settlements on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the 18th and early 19th century, formerly enslaved Crucians self-liberated and developed a community in St. Croix’s northwest hills. These rugged hills provided an ideal location for self-liberated Crucians (Maroons) to avoid detection and establish settlements. Our recent pilot study survey used a combination of lidar and environmental data to develop an archaeological predictive model to identify where these habitation sites may be located. We employed pedestrian survey and metal detecting to investigate these locations and test the efficacy of the predictive model. As we examined the lidar data further, we found numerous small, relatively flat locations that could have served as habitation locations and focused our survey on these locales, partly because of the rugged and treacherous nature of the northwest hills. Our survey found three promising locations and the preliminary results indicate that St. Croix’s Maroons utilized a variety of environmental and landscape features in selecting locations to live in this region. This paper examines the use of predictive models in identifying Maroon sites and how traditional survey methodologies likely will not find Maroon settlements on St. Croix.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37143.0