Household, Village, and Landscape: The Built Environments of Slavery in the Caribbean (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
Plantation landscapes on the Georgia coast were created and maintained by plantation owners and enslaved peoples with influences from the broader Atlantic World. Slave housing and settlements on Sea Island cotton and rice plantations on Sapelo and St. Simon’s Islands are an especially useful way to examine the combination of African, Caribbean, European, and later American influences and material results of tensions between these influences. However, many previous interpretations of enslaved life on the Georgia coast have been based on standing domestic architecture and enslaved people listed in later census records, creating a bias towards a small subset of the enslaved populations. Here I take a contextual approach to explore the lowcountry in the context of the broader Atlantic World; examine the spatial connection between plantation management styles and plantation settlement landscapes; and critically examine slave housing on the coast; and investigate if there is a connection between type of slave housing and settlement landscape organization. I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to quantify plantation spaces with Thiessen tessellations at five plantations to conclude that the settlement space of the Sapelo Plantation is significantly different than at nearby plantation settlements. Archaeological and geophysical investigations at Bush Camp Field and Behavior settlements within the Sapelo Plantation show a connection between the geometry of settlement space and evidence of place-making with wattle and tabby daub slave cabins that are similar to those identified in Caribbean plantation contexts. Though plantation owners defined the structure and boundaries of certain plantation spaces, enslaved people could manipulate, maintain, and control certain parts of those landscapes. The degree to which enslaved people could engage in reconfigurations of private places and spatial control of settlement spaces is reflected in the rigidity of the plantation landscape.
‘Haciendas and Plantations’: History and limitations of a 60-year-old taxonomy
Critique of Anthropology
America and the Antilles' in the Jamaican journal Social and Economic Studies. This article discusses the production of the Wolf and Mintz article, its analytical framework and the theoretical tensions it contains, and its subsequent influence, mainly though not exclusively on anthropological and historical scholarship about large landed properties in Latin America and the Caribbean. 'Haciendas and Plantations' appeared at a time when anthropologists such as Elman Service, Charles Wagley, and Marvin Harris were trying to make sense of agrarian Latin America by developing typologies of labour relations, rural populations, and forms of property. These efforts never successfully resolved the inherent tension between ethnographic or historical content, on the one hand, and Weberian ideal type definitions, on the other, although Wolf and Mintz's article came closer to doing this than the other works in the typological genre. In part, this was because it analysed discrete dimensions of large landed estates -capital, labour, land, markets, technology, sumptuary patterns, and so on -in a manner intended to stimulate cross-regional, cross-national, and trans-historical comparisons. 'Haciendas and Plantations', however, saw these elements as largely determining local-level outcomes on the ground and left little analytical room for contingency or rural class struggle in driving historical processes or shaping property relations and land use. Despite the article's scant historical content, it nonetheless continues to serve as a point of departure in early twenty-first-century agrarian studies and the analytical tensions it embodied are still significant in comparative social scientific research.
The comparison of patterns of refuse disposal between populations has been a consistent theme in historical archaeology. The present study acknowledges the impact of the physical environment and social status in shaping how people created and used their built landscape. Triangulation of three kinds of data—spatial, archaeological, and historical—facilitates recognition of the differences or similarities between groups on Sapelo and St. Simon’s Islands in the Georgia Lowcountry. A series of artifact density maps, generated in R and GIS, are made for slave and planter groups within sites and are divided into kinds of space to evaluate potential levels of slave autonomy within a plantation. The goal of this paper is to identify the relationship between living quarters on the landscape and the material refuse at both planter and slave spaces to see how and why groups use space in different ways.
The Political Ecology of Plantations from the Ground Up
Little work has been done to examine the political ecology and environmental legacy of sugar colonies in the Caribbean. Material excavated from the Morne Patate plantation in southern Dominica occupied from the late seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century offer a perfect opportunity to examine the intersections between Caribbean colonial enterprises and the domestic economises of enslaved households. Analysis of macrobotanical remains associated with the houses, gardens, and provision grounds of the enslaved inhabitants at Morne Patate reveal a mixture of African, American, and European cereals, fruits, and vegetables. Maize (Zea mays) dominates the assemblage, and the recovery of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and millet (Pennisetum glaucum) indicate a concern with high yield cereals and perhaps experimentation with producing crops in a range of local microenvironments. Remains of several coffee cherries (Coffea sp.) from a household context suggest that the enslaved inhabitants at Morne Patate were producing some amount of coffee either for personal consumption or possibly for sale at local markets.
2017
I cannot remember a time when I did not love history, but a love of history does not make one a historian. That process began when I was a freshman at William and Mary and chose to take an all-day Saturday class on the colonial Chesapeake. As we visited historic sites across the Tidewater, I began to think about history differently. No longer just the study of the past for me, history's material remains were embedded in the modern landscape just waiting to be explored. Historic structures, archaeological sites, and historical artifacts had as much to say as the historical documents with which I had become familiar. Writing my thesis then gave me the first opportunity to ask many of the questions that I continued to interrogate and build upon at the University of South Carolina. At the University of South Carolina, Woody Holton and Lydia Brandt stewarded both this project and my growth as a scholar during my time at the University of South Carolina. They have worked tirelessly to make me both a better scholar and a better person and for that I am eternally grateful. Others, earlier in my career as a historian, set me on this path. James P. Whittenburg, Carolyn Whittenburg, Carl Lounsbury, and Susan Kern first introduced me to the study of history, and specifically the study of architecture and material culture. I was taught by giants and I can only hope to someday live up to their examples as scholars, educators, and human beings. I am grateful to Mark Smith and Matt Childs, who served on the committee for this dissertation, as well as many others. Mark Smith encouraged me to think more iv creatively about my sources, to investigate the texture of the past, and introduced me to sensory history. Matt Childs pushed me beyond the boundaries of the British Atlantic into the Francophone and Iberian Atlantics. Allison Marsh has been a source of great advice and friendship throughout graduate school. Ann Johnson, who brought me to the University of South Carolina as Director of Graduate Studies, encouraged me to think beyond my already-porous disciplinary boundaries. This dissertation and my future work have benefited greatly from their influence. David Brown and Thane Harpole both provided insight into the Virginia plantation landscape, especially at Fairfield Plantation, and facilitated my quadrennial interest in actually digging archaeological sites.