Marine Art as a Research Tool for Investigating Cask Assemblages Found on Eighteenth Century Shipwrecks Identified as Slave-Trade Ships

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Casks were containers for provisions, supplies, and trade goods aboard ships in the Atlantic world for over 2000 years. On eighteenth century ships engaged in the “Triangle of Trade” the number, capacities, and contents of casks carried depended on stage of the voyage. Identifying a historic shipwreck as a slave-trade vessel may depend on material cultural analysis of the finds’ assemblage and whether or not it includes “signature” artifacts; including evidence for significant numbers of water casks. In this paper we explore the potential of contemporary marine art for complementing historic and archaeological records when investigating eighteenth century slave-trade shipwrecks. We present findings from a case study by which casks depicted in paintings of the slave-trade ship La Marie Seraphique were analyzed and compared with the cask assemblage recovered from North Carolina shipwreck 31CR314; identified as remains of La Concorde, a 1717 slave-trade vessel out of Nantes, France.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow