Musket Balls as Fish Net Sinkers: A Biographical Analysis of Material Reuse from the 18th-Century British Virgin Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

When identifying and cataloging artifacts, archaeologists use a variety of techniques to increase the understanding of a site based on the analysis of excavated artifacts. A widely used method is to classify artifacts by their function– although function is often difficult to pinpoint for recycled and reused items. A biographical approach that goes beyond static functional categories and accounts for the changing relationship between people and their things is suggested as an alternative. In this paper, I offer a biographical analysis of lead musket balls modified as fish net sinkers associated with 18th-century cotton farmers and fishermen in the British Virgin Islands. As the fortunes of British colonization and economic opportunity changed in the region, the balls value as ammunition was superseded by their value as fishing gear thus revealing hidden tensions between what individual households held as priorities versus those of colonial administrators.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow