Material and Social Landscapes at LaSoye, Dominica, 15th-18th Century

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.

As widely reported, the incursion of Europeans into the Caribbean triggered a significant rupture within cultural systems that developed over thousands of years. Indigenous communities were disrupted, enslaved, eradicated, displaced, and subjugated as European empires and settlers created colonies based on extractive economies and ecologies. In this paper, we discuss how the colonial process was geopolitically uneven, illustrating how Indigenous groups actively resisted and negotiated their survival and power in diverse ways. While plantation societies have been the dominant focus in Caribbean historical archaeology, our research examines an Indigenous landscape on the island of Dominica, where relationships with colonists were primarily controlled by ancestral Kalinago groups until the mid-18th century. Results from archaeological research at the site of LaSoye, where material culture reveals a counter-narrative to European dominance over social and economic landscapes in the colonial Caribbean, highlights the importance of considering Caribbean transformations in broader temporal and geographic scales.

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