Material Culture and Maritime Identity: Identifying Maritime Subcultures Through Artifacts

Abstract

The maritime cultural landscape approach focuses primarily on the impact of people on the environment. The archaeological record has the potential to reveal insights into how people internalized their environment through their use of material culture. Pirates were a subset of the eighteenth-century maritime world, with social organization and customs that set them apart from other mariners. Stanley South’s artifact categories provide a starting point for comparing the material assemblages between one pirate-related site, the Barcadares in Belize, with materials from two contemporary sites on Nevis, the Ridge Complex and Port St. George. This comparison highlights a number of differences in the Barcadares assemblage, including a high percentage of tobacco pipes, the dominance of bowls, the lack of drinking forms and utilitarian wares, and the generally limited diversity of ceramic wares and forms. This study alone is not sufficient to establish any pattern for pirates or other maritime groups, but suggests the effectiveness of this approach for further research.