Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Uneven Topographies: Archaeology of Plantations and Caribbean Slave Economies

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts

Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

Abstract

Thirty five years of archaeological examinations in former British West Indian colonies have revealed that there is a substantial material record of slavery between from the mid-seventeenth century up until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This material record is manifest in documents written about colonial enterprises by metropolitan administrators, the landscapes envisioned and produced by settlers in the colonies, and the everyday forms of material culture that comprise the archaeological record of plantation life. Capitalism and colonialism are necessary forces for explaining the material record of slavery. At the same time, however, the cultural input and innovation are also important. In this article, I show how the archaeology of slavery in the Caribbean sheds light on the diverse practices of enslaved labor in which the frames of colonialism and capitalism are not sufficient explanatory devices.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Anonymous. 1797 Characteristic traits of the Creolian and African Negroes in Jamaica. In Columbia Magazine III.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. V. 1990 The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. V. 1991 The Afro-Jamaican community at Drax Hall. Jamaica Journal 24(1): 3–8.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. V. 1992. African-Jamaican housing at Seville: A study of spatial transformation.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. V. 1998. Cultural transformation within enslaved labor communities in the Caribbean. In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by J. G. Cusick, pp. 378–401. Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations, Carbondale.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. V. 1999. Archaeology and ethnohistory of the Caribbean plantation. In “I, too, am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by T. A. Singleton, pp. 173–92. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, Douglas and Kennet G. Kelly. 2000 Settlement Patterns and the Origins of African Jamaican Society: Seville Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Ethnohistory 7(2):369–397.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D., and K. G. Kelly. 2000. Settlement patterns and the origins of African Jamaican society: Seville Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Ethnohistory 7(2): 369–947.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong, D. V. and Hauser, M. W. 2009 A Sea of Diversity: Historical Archaeology in the Caribbean. International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by T. Majewski and D. Gaimster, pp. 583–612. Springer: New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beckwith, M. W. 1929 Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Best, L. 1998 Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy (After twenty-five years). Marronage 1: 27–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Best, Lloyd and Levvit, K. 1967 Externally Propelled Growth in the Caribbean: Selected Essays, mimeo. McGill Centre for Developing Area Studies, McGill University, Montreal.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blackburn, R. 1997a The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800. Verso, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blackburn, R. 1997b The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery William and Mary Quarterly (1): 65–102.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, V. 1994 Higgling: The Language of Markets in Economic Discourse. In Higgling: Transactors and Their Markets in the History of Economics, edited by M.S. Morgan, pp. 66–93. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Browne, P. [1759] 1789. The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica. B. White and Son.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cassidy, F. G., and R. Le Page, London. [1967] 1980. Dictionary of Jamaican English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Council of Jamaica. 1678. Council Minutes. Volume 2, Folio 159v, 8 (August). Jamaica Archives and Records Department.

    Google Scholar 

  • Craton, M., and J. Walvin. 1970. A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, D.B. 1966 The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, D.B. 1997 Constructing Race: A Reflection. William and Mary Quarterly LIV(1): 7–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deagan, K. 2002 Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500–1800. Vol. 2, Portable Personal Possessions. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunn, R. S. 1972. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, VA, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeFoe, D. [1756] 1895. Journal of the Year of the Plague. Longmans, New York:

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 1998 An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Plenum Press, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 1999 The landscapes of class negotiation on coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, 1797–1850. Historical Archaeology 33(1): 136–58.

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 2000a The material and cognitive dimensions of creolization in nineteenth-century Jamaica. Historical Archaeology 34(3): 56–72.

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 2000b. Gender, power and space: Negotiating social relations under slavery on coffee plantations in Jamaica, 1790–1834. In Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class and Gender, edited by J. A. Delle, S. A. Mrozowski, and R. Paynter, pp. 168–203. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 2001. Race, missionaries, and the struggle to free Jamaica. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity, edited by C. E. Orser, pp. 177–95. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City:

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 2002. Power and landscape: Spatial dynamics in early-nineteenth-century Jamaica. In The Dynamics of Power, edited by M. O’Donovan, pp. 341–61. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 30. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

    Google Scholar 

  • Delle, J. A. 2009 The Governor and the Enslaved: An Archaeology of Colonial Modernity at Marshall’s Pen, Jamaica. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13(4): 488–512.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ebanks, R. 1984. Ma Lou, an Afro Jamaican pottery tradition. Jamaica Journal 17: 31–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edwards, B. 1793, 1972 The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. Research library of colonial Americana; 2. Arno Press, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, W. 1744. The Timber-Tree Improved. Printed for, and sold by T. Osborne and M. Cooper.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fennell, C. C. 2003 Group identity, individual creativity, and symbolic generation in a BaKongo diaspora. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7: 1–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fennell, C. C. 2007a Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fennell, C. C. 2007b BaKongo identity and symbolic expressions in the Americas. In Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Ogundiran, A., and Falola, T., pp 199–232. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fielding, H. 1791. The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. Printed for J. L. Legrand.

    Google Scholar 

  • Franklin, M., and Fesler, G. 1999. The exploration of ethnicity and the historical archaeological record. In Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation, and the Interpretation of Ethnicity, edited by M. Franklin and G. Fesler, pp1–10. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Galle, J. 2010 Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake. American Antiquity 75(1): 19–43.

    Google Scholar 

  • Genovese, E. 1972 Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goveia, E. V. 1965. Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century. Caribbean series 8. Yale University Press, New Haven.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goveia, E. V. 1970 The West Indian Slave laws of the Eighteenth Century. Cave Hill Campus Barbados: University of West Indies.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goveia, E. V. 1980. A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Howard University Press, Washington, D.C.

    Google Scholar 

  • Handler, J. S. and F. Lange. 1978 Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Archaeological and Historical Investigation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hauser, M. 2008The Archaeology of Black Markets, Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth Century Jamaica. University Press, Florida, Gainesville.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hauser, M. and C. R. DeCorse. 2003 Low-Fired Earthenwares in the African Diaspora: Problems and Prospects. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7(1): 67–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Helms, M. 1988 Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higman, B. W. 1976. (Editor) Characteristic Traits of the Creolian and African Negroes in Jamaica. Caldwell Press Originally Published by an anonymous author in Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany, April–Oct., 1797. Kingston, Jamaica: William Smith Publisher.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higman, B. W. 1986a. Plantation Maps as Sources for the Study of West Indian Ethnohistory. In Ethnohistory: A Researcher’s Guide, edited by D. Wiedman, pp. 107–36. Studies in Third World Societies, Publication No. 35. Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higman, B. W. 1986b. Jamaican Coffee Plantations, 1780–1860: A Cartographic Analysis. Caribbean Geography 2: 73–91.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higman, B. W. 1987. The spatial economy of Jamaican sugar plantations: Cartographic evidence from the 18th and 19th centuries. Journal of Historical Geography 13(1): 17–19.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Higman, B. W. 1988. Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Institute of Jamaica Publications, Jamaica and San Francisco.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higman, B. W. 1998. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. The Press, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

    Google Scholar 

  • Howson, J. 1990 Social Relations and Material Culture: A Critique of the Archaeology of Plantation Slavery. Historical Archaeology 23: 78–91.

    Google Scholar 

  • James, C.L.R. 1963. Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed. revised from 1963. Vintage, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jamaica. 1735. Acts of Assembly, passed in the island of Jamaica; from 1681, to 1734, inclusive.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jamaica. 1738. Acts of Assembly, passed in the island of Jamaica; from 1681, to 1737, inclusive. London,

    Google Scholar 

  • Jamaica. 1738 [1739]. In Eighteenth Century Online, St Jago de la Vega.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jamaica. 1743. Acts of Assembly, passed in the Island of Jamaica; from 1681, to 1737, Inclusive.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jamaica. 1786. An Abridgment of the Laws of Jamaica: comprehending the subject-matter of each Act and clause, … To which is prefixed, by way of index, a table …. In Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Kingston, Jamaica.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jamaica. 1793. An Abridgment of the Laws of Jamaica; Being an alphabetical digest of all the public Acts of Assembly now in force, from the thirty-second year of King Charles II. to the thirty-second year of … George III. Inclusive, as published in two volumes… Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katzin, M. F. 1959a. Community organization in rural Jamaica. Social and Economic Studies 8(4): 424–429

    Google Scholar 

  • Katzin, M. F. 1959b. The Jamaican country higgler. Social and Economic Studies 8(4): 421–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katzin, M. F. 1960. The business of higglering in Jamaica. Social and Economic Studies 9(3): 297–331.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, C. 1740. A New and Exact account of Jamaica, wherein the ancient and present state of that colony, its importance to Great Britain, laws, trade, manners and religion, together with the most remarkable and curious animals, plants, trees, &c. are described: with a particular account of the sacrifices, libations, &c. at this day in use among the negroes.… 3rd ed. R. Fleming, Edinburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leone, M. P., and G. Fry. 1999. Conjuring in the big house kitchen: An interpretation of African American belief systems based on the uses of archaeology and folklore sources. Journal of American Folklore 112: 372–403.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Long, E. [1774] 1970. The history of Jamaica; or, General survey of the ancient and modern state of that island: with reflections on its situations, settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws, and government. New, with a new introduction by George Metcalf. Cass library of West Indian studies, No. 12, F. Cass, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • McDonald, R. A. 1993 The economy and material culture of slaves: goods and chattels on the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyers, A. D. 1999. West African tradition in the decoration of colonial Jamaican folk pottery. Journal of Historical Archaeology 3(4): 201–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mintz, S. W. 1955. The Jamaican internal marketing pattern. Social and Economic Studies 4: 95–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mintz, Sidney. 1971 Men, Women, and Trade. Comparative Studies in Society and History 13(3): 247–269.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mintz, S. W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The place of sugar in modern history. Viking, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mintz, S. W., and D. Hall. [1970] 1991. The origins of the Jamaican internal marketing system. In Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader, edited by V. Shepherd, pp. 319–34. New Press, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicholas, D. 1986 The “Syrians” of Jamaica. Jamaican Historical Review 15: 50–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ogundiran, A., and T. Falola. 2007. Pathways in the archaeology of transatlantic Africa. In Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by A. Ogundiran and T. Falola, pp. 3–48. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patterson, Orlando. 1969 The sociology of slavery; an analysis of the origins, development, and structure of Negro slave society in Jamaica. Rutherford [N.J.]: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patterson, Orlando. 1982 Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reeves, M. 1997 “By Their Own Labor”: Enslaved Africans’ Survival Strategies on Two Jamaican Plantations. Ph.D. Dissertation, Syracuse University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruppel, T., J. Neuwirth, M. Leone and G. Fry. 2003. Hidden in view: African spiritual spaces in North American landscapes. Antiquity 77: 321–335.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sauer, Carl. 1966 The Early Spanish Main. Berkely: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sweet, J.H. 1997 The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought. William and Mary Quarterly LIV (1): 143–166.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, David. 2003 Political rationalities of the Jamaican modern. Small Axe 14: 1–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, David. 2004a. Modernity that predated the modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean. History Workshop Journal 58: 191–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, David. 2004b Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke University Press, Durham.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmonds, L. E. 2004 The Afro-Jamaican and Internal Marketing Systems: Kingston, 1780–1834. In Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: history, heritage and culture, edited by K. Monteith, pp. 274–290. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Skowronek, Russell K. 1987 Ceramics and Commerce: The 1554 flota Revisited. Historical Archaeology 21(2): 101111.

    Google Scholar 

  • Skowronek, Russell K. 1992 Empire and Ceramics: The Changing Role of Illicit Trade in Spanish America. Historical Archaeology 26(1): 109–118

    Google Scholar 

  • Sloane, H. S. 1707–1725. A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands; to which is prefix’d an introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighbouring continent, and islands of America. Illustrated with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved; in large copper-plates as big as the life. Printed by B. M. for the author, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, A. 1776 1994 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Modern Library, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stern, Steven. 1988 Feudalism, Capitalism and the World-system in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean. American Historical Review 93: 829–872.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, James. 1823 A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica. London: Oliver and Boyd, Tweeddale-House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, S.A.G. 1965 The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomich, D. 1994 Small Islands, Large Comparisons. Social Science History 18(3): 339–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trouillot, M-R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, Boston.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trouillot, M-R. 1992 The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 19–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trouillot, M-R. 2003 Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vincentelli, M. 2004. Women Potters: Transforming Traditions. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, K. and F. Smith. 2009 Urbanity, Sociability, and Commercial Exchange in the Barbados Sugar Trade: A Comparative Colonial Archaeological Perspective on Bridgetown, Barbados in the Seventeenth Century. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13(1): 63–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Eric. 1970 From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean. Vintage Books, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Eric. 1961 Capitalism & Slavery. Russell & Russell, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Eric Eustace. 1994 Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilkie, L. A. 1997. Secret and sacred: Contextualizing the artifacts of African-American magic and religion. Historical Archaeology 31(4): 81–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilkie, L. A. 2000. Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840–1950. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Mark W. Hauser

Authors
  1. Mark W. Hauser
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark W. Hauser .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Anthropology, Wesleyan University, High Street 281, Middletown, 06459, USA

    Sarah K. Croucher

  2. Stanford Archaeology Center, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Amsterdam Avenue 1200, Palo Alto, 94305, California, USA

    Lindsay Weiss

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hauser, M.W. (2011). Uneven Topographies: Archaeology of Plantations and Caribbean Slave Economies. In: Croucher, S., Weiss, L. (eds) The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0192-6_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation