Emerging Materialities and Landscapes of Early Colonial Encounters at LaSoye, Dominica

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Encounters on the Caribbean Frontier: Archaeology at LaSoye, Dominica", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Contemporary archaeological research of Indigenous-European interactions in the colonial Caribbean explores themes of Indigenous resilience and agency in the face of encroaching European conquest. This paper presents an overview of ongoing archaeological work at LaSoye, a colonial era European trading complex dating as early as the 16th century on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Until the late 18th century, Dominica was one of few territories controlled by the Kalinago, the Indigenous inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles. The goal of this project is to characterize the relationship between the ancestral Kalinago and the European settlers at LaSoye, and examine the political, economic, and socioecological realities of an informal trading encampment in the Caribbean colonial frontier. In this paper, we include perspectives from the archaeological team, as well as our local collaborators, including descendants of the Indigenous communities that lived and interacted at LaSoye.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Colonial Encounters on the Caribbean Frontier: Archaeology at LaSoye, Dominica   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow