The Great House and the Old Plate: Planter Household Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological interpretations of household organization have long recognized its role in the construction of social identities and in the furtherance of social goals. While much of the historical archaeology of Jamaica, and indeed the Caribbean more broadly, has focused on exploring spatial and consumption choices of enslaved Africans and African descendants, application of these kinds of analysis at the household level for planters is less widely applied. Yet, as archaeologies of whiteness are beginning to demonstrate, white identities are equally constructed within this same milieu and demand to be interrogated and deconstructed. We might expect this to be particularly true during the period historians have termed the “fall of the planter class” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when both the physical and political security of the planter class was under pressure. Thus, by analyzing the spatial and consumptive patterns of planters, we may be able to mark their deployment of material strategies furtherance of their own social goals. This paper describes evidence recovered from Stewart Castle, a Jamaican sugar plantation great house occupied in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40443.0