In the Shade of the Sugarcane: Detecting Illegal Trade in Jamaican Slave Quarter Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Enslaved communities imprisoned on colonial sugar plantations engaged in and fostered a web of informal economies across Jamaica, which often manifested as street markets and were frequently accused of illegality. Because the Jamaican street markets were linked to illegal trade, and because illegality in the Caribbean was primarily linked to the merchant instead of the material, this thesis uses regression analysis to investigate the relationship between imported goods in several slave quarter sites and their distance to coastal street markets. Furthermore, the analysis conducted examines both spatial and temporal relationships, observing the behavior of a century of imported artifacts in 25-year intervals. While the results of this analysis can only begin to speak to the informal economies, new questions regarding the illegal are posed. Establishing the extent of enslaved communities engaged in illegal activity assists in understanding enslaved lifeways and the necessary shadow economies cast by the plantation model.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow