Conference Agenda

This paper examines the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the citrus lime industry (ca. 1852-1928) on the island of Montserrat. It examines how the new industry, largely catalyzed by the British Quaker Sturge family, provoked changes to the island's post-sugar landscape as well as its inhabitants. Using a multi-scalar approach that combines archaeological data from two mid-to-late nineteenth-century domestic sites, the Sturge family's island residence (the Cot) and the Afro-Montserratian Bramble family's home (Delvins House), along with archival research and spatial analysis at varying scales it explores the extent of the lime industry's impact on land use, settlement patterns, and labor relations. Understanding the archaeological evidence related to this period provides a fuller understanding of the complexities of colonial and capitalist processes and the diversity of experiences at the local level involved in shaping the post-emancipation Caribbean.

Settler colonialism shaped colonial societies from contact to the current moment through the organization of space, production, and consumption in plantation-based societies. It also structured power through organizing identity, particularly through the deployment of white supremacist practices. How white supremacy was enacted materially by planters throughout the North American colonies and through time was not monolithic. Instead, the strategies and tactics of supremacy were shaped by the scale and societal circumstances in which they were deployed. This paper describes evidence recovered from Stewart Castle, Jamaica; the home of a resident planter family during the “fall of the planter class” period to mark how the process of settler colonialism shaped the social landscape of a planter household in an era defined by a challenge to planter supremacy.

British settlement on Dominica, a relative late-comer to the settler colonial project, was initially driven by plantation models established on other islands. This colonial project relied heavily on settlement (oftentimes forced) of large numbers of people and the dramatic reordering of the physical landscape, yet those most profiting from this system often never put foot on the island. The lack of direct owner oversight opened up space on the social landscape for others, especially as local conditions required alterations and adaptations to the aforementioned plantation models imported from elsewhere. Local agents were able to turn their on-the-ground knowledge and networks to their advantage in efforts to enrich themselves and further their own social positioning. This paper will offer a cursory examination of the moves made by middle-management on Dominica. Particular attention will be paid to Dugald S. Laidlaw, perhaps one of the most successful of these on-island attorneys.

The Caribbean island of St. Lucia followed a distinctive course of colonial development. Unlike other islands, where vast sugar estates were in the hands of wealthy absentee owners, St. Lucia experienced prolonged political instability and its system of settler colonialism developed slowly and more sporadically. The corresponding availability of land allowed people without much capital to purchase and develop smaller properties, providing a foothold for free people of color to amass wealth and establish a large and relatively prosperous class of landowners and merchants that rapidly consolidated political power. Many of these people were strong supporters of the French Revolution, both politically and economically. This paper examines the growth of the free black community, the ways it navigated the complex social landscape of a society economically dependent on race-based slavery, and its outsized impact on the wars that swept the greater Caribbean and the larger world in the 1790s.

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.

The 1865 migration of over 300 Barbadians from the Caribbean to Liberia is a chapter of the African Diaspora representing complex pathways from the plantation to anticipated prosperity in Africa. The migrants, many coming from the rising and recently-emancipated middle class, were eager to leave behind a society that had long been defined by sugar and slavery. Yet, they brought with them to Liberia beliefs and lifeways molded by the settler colonial system that they fled. Recovered during fieldwork in the West Indies and West Africa, we present evidence of what Caribbean migrants carried with them from their homelands, and how West Indian models were transformed across many generations in Liberia. The plantation logic weighed heavily on those who left Barbados, leaving a mark on the Liberian landscape that remains visible today.

In the late 17th century, the island of Barbuda was inhabited by approximately 75 enslaved people of African descent and a few Anglo-Caribbean settlers. By 1718, the people of Barbuda were governed locally by the on-site estate manager, taking direction from an attorney in Antigua and an absentee landowner in England. Using critical fabulation, archaeology, and historical records the power dynamics inherent in the oversight of the Barbuda Plantation emerge. The push and pull of changing economic strategies are evident as attorneys and managers struggled to secure their positions by enacting plans handed to them from abroad. The expertise of laboring populations was frequently the lynchpin upon which the managers’ success balanced. The traditional knowledge of enslaved people is seldom credited, erased from the archives, but can be teased out from between the lines. Through the centuries, these shifting economies have contributed to the development of Barbudan indigenous culture.

In the 21st century, St. Kitts’ southeast peninsula is an aspiring playground for rich foreigners, which mirrors its colonial heritage when absentee landowners used the land and enslaved African labor to fuel their extravagant lives in Britan and the Caribbean. In this presentation, I provide a brief history of land ownership to understand how the southeast peninsula has served as an extractive environment for off-island interests. Then, I will explore the pre- and post-emancipation material culture of Kittitian laborers to identify consumer choice strategies among different households. Differences in housing styles and construction materials and ceramic acquisition and discard between households on these plantations reflect diverse investment strategies and agency of the families living there and whether the plantation produced cotton or sugar.

The growth of the settler economy in Jamaica was driven not only by the export of agricultural commodities, but by the importation of objects to be used on the plantations by the enslaved population. Long standing tradition in Jamaica held that plantation managers working for absentee planters would be compensated for the activities by collecting a 6% commission on both sales of plantation produce and the purchase of goods to be used on the plantation. This arrangement created great tension between the absentees and the settler attorneys who were acting on their behalf, and who were profiting handsomely through the over importation of goods. In this paper I propose that the retooling and reuse of iron and copper artifacts by the enslaved population of Marshalls Pen reflects both the ingenuity of the workers who created new objects for their use, as well as the colonial tensions between settlers and absentees.

During Hurricanes Irma and Maria (2017) the Federal Emergency Management Agency engaged in an efficient debris removal program – under Mission Assignments with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency. A variety of additional USVI partners and private contractors were cooperating partners. The back-to-back devastating storms damaged more than buildings and infrastructure – they also impacted resident’s physical and mental health. That a variety of government entities took the effort to allow individuals access to culturally significant tropical hardwood (teak and mahogany) debris related to the Danish Colonial period historic landscape is one example of thoughtful consideration that the allied government partners gave to the community and its culture.

Procedures to repurpose tropical hardwoods were proposed by the Commissioner of Agriculture, and were practical – allowing members of traditional Wood Worker Societies access to culturally significant hardwoods, and later codified by the Community and Heritage Tree law.

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.