ZooMS Analysis of Sea Turtle Bone Disks from Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts, West Indies

Summary

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

The bone button industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Brimstone Hill Fortress on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts is well documented. Here, British soldiers and enslaved Africans manufactured single-hole bone disks that likely served as cores for cloth covered buttons. Tens of thousands of these disks and removals have been recovered at the site. Most disks are made from cattle bones, but enslaved African contexts yielded greater numbers of buttons made of sea turtle bones. However, the particular species of sea turtles are unidentified. Today, leatherback, green, and hawksbill sea turtles nest on the beaches of the island, while only one historic sighting of a loggerhead turtle in the surrounding waters has been recorded. Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) offers a way to identify worked bone material through collagen peptide mass fingerprinting. Here we present ZooMS results of sea turtle bone buttons from an enslaved African context (BSH 2), and barracks occupied by soldiers (BSH 5), which allows for exploring differences in access to sea turtle and selection of sea turtle species. These results also provide valuable data on sea turtle populations in St. Kitts in antiquity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37297.0