Untamed Ecologies And Fugitive Geographies In Colonial Dominica, 1763 – 1978

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Social Landscapes of Settler Colonialism in the Caribbean", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From 1763 to 1834, Maroons opposed enslavement by establishing fugitive geographies of resistance in British colonial Dominica. Within the mountainous hinterlands, the Maroons created communities in areas deemed invaluable by state agents and agricultural enterprises. This study highlights how untamed ecologies and fugitive geographies of Dominican Maroons disrupted cartographical concepts of European settler colonialism based on order, hierarchy, and exploitation. By the late 1800s, British colonial officials and settlers continued transforming the social and environmental landscape by creating plantations and roads in the interior modifying the Maroon geographies. However, lack of profits led many settlers to abandon their inland estates. The British settler colonial project endured till 1978, and in the final decade, Rastafarians resisted security forces by reinhabiting former Maroon sites and by traversing their historic trails. I explore the connections between these fugitive geographies and sustainable settlement ecologies to discuss place-making, resistance, and alterations to this contested landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Social Landscapes of Settler Colonialism in the Caribbean   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow