Mark W. Hauser

Low-Fired Earthenwares in the African Diaspora: Problems and Prospects

Local earthenware associated with enslaved African populations in the Americas, variously called “Colono-Ware,” “Afro-Caribbean Ware.” “Yabbas,” and “Criollo ware,” has received considerable attention from researchers. What unifies this disparate group of ceramics is not method of manufacture, design and decoration, or even form and function but the association or potential association with African diaspora populations. The ceramics incorporate some skills and techniques possibly brought by African potters to the Americas, as well as skills reflecting European and Native American traditions, and local adaptations in form, function, and manufacture. Analogies linking African ceramic traditions to American industries have at times been employed uncritically and have relied on generalized characteristics to infer overly specific meanings. With particular reference to low-fired earthenwares from Jamaica, this paper examines the historical and cultural context of these ceramics and the methodological and theoretical problems faced in their interpretation.

The archaeology of not being governed: A counterpoint to a history of settlement of two colonies in the eastern Caribbean

In this article we examine the role of informal settlements inhabited by Europeans, Africans and, potentially, indigenous people in the eighteenth-century insular Caribbean. Rather than simply being frontier settlements established in anticipation of formal colonization, in many cases settlements on and beyond the margins of colonies represent alternative possibilities and facilitate ways of life, modes of production, and means of trade and exchange that are at odds with expected norms of colonial society. We view such settlements as holdouts, practicing what James Scott refers to as the ‘art of not being governed’. To make this argument we compare ethnohistorical data related to settlement patterns in St John and Dominica and archaeological data retrieved from household excavations of plantation settlements dating to the eighteenth century. Examining such settlements allows us to map the range of variation in colonial life during the apogee of plantation-based slavery.

A Sea of Diversity: Historical Archaeology in the Caribbean

The Caribbean region projects a rich diversity in cultural settings that relate to a complex historical landscape in which local contexts punctuate global trends with unique material expressions. Archaeologists have explored a wide range of social issues and intellectual problems including colonialism, contact, globalization, power, and the complexities of slavery and freedom. This chapter will provide an overview of historical archaeology in the region including a review of research foci, an examination of thematic problems that have been addressed, theoretical approaches that have been used, and perspectives on new trends and ideas that are being explored today (Figs. 1 and 2). The social history of the region defines some of the key problems that researchers have addressed. For the Caribbean Basin, this includes understanding the region as a point of contact between European and Native Americans, a place where the Atlantic worlds of Africa, Europe, and theAmericas, and in particular the Caribbean, served as a critical stage for the intersection of global relations (Fig. 3). Archaeological studies have in one way or another addressed and bridged broad geographical, cultural, and political issues with the examination of localized sites and global contexts. Archaeologists have pursued their research from a wide range of theoretical perspectives and thematic interests, but the composite results highlight the importance of understanding historical contexts of cultural diversity, the richness of local history, and the interconnected nature of social relations from multiple scales of analysis.

An East Indian Laborers’ Household in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica: A Case for Understanding Cultural Diversity through Space, Chronology, and Material Analysis

Cultural diversity is a hallmark of the Caribbean region. This diversity is the result of many diasporas, including European, African, East Asian, and East Indian. Historical archaeology has focused on cultural permutations of the demographically dominant European and African groups. The archaeological record of other groups is present and can add to our understanding of the true depth of diversity in the emergence of social landscapes. This paper explores chronological, spatial, and material evidence related to an East Indian laborers’ household excavated in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. The ways in which space was structured and materials used were distinct from patterns observed in the households of African Jamaicans who resided in a separate locus at the same site. This data suggests potential of examining cultural identities through archaeology.

Uneven Topographies: Archaeology of Plantations and Caribbean Slave Economies

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.

A Political Ecology of Water and Enslavement: Water Ways in Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Plantations

Recent headlines about Michigan, California, and India have disabused a public conventional wisdom that water is free of charge. Cases such as these, where human needs directly compete with institutional forces, are not new. Water, as a substance essential to production and reproduction in eighteenth-century Caribbean plantations, created a predicament, the resolution of which was unevenly borne by human beings held as slaves. Building on Barbara Voss’ concept of the mesoscale and Maria Zedeno’s insights about index objects, I present an assemblage-based analysis of slave life that compares “water ways” at two plantations occupied during Dominica’s brief sugar boom (1760–1830). I combine material characteristics of objects used to capture and transform water with their biographies in a landscape, circulations in peripheral flows, and supporting roles in social relations. Pottery and glass used to store, capture, and serve water were part of the creative strategies used by enslaved laborers to resolve some of the predicaments of slavery. At the same time, they created predicaments of their own, as media for some of the cultural politics that supported plantation colonies. As such, a focus on water ways allows us to examine exclusionary forces, such as regulation, markets, violence, and legitimation, at the human scale.

Toward a South Asian Historical Archaeology

This article briefly reviews historical archaeologies of South Asia. In 1996 Charles Orser argued that historical archaeology needs to consider its own definition more broadly and internationalize its scope (Orser 1996). Such an approach would define the contours of the modern world more concretely. This program of research has been widely adopted, yet it has been hampered, to a certain extent, by its hemispheric focus on the Atlantic World. South Asia, as a key constituent of the Indian Ocean, troubles this approach to historical archaeology and demands consideration of other circulations, epicenters, and agendas in the development of the modern world. This article considers that trade, landscapes, and material culture all point to a modern world in which the Atlantic World is not the only epicenter.

Risky business: Rice and inter-colonial dependencies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans

In this paper we are concerned with some issues of inter-colonial dependency, especially in food and with a focus on rice that both directly linked the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds and that highlight some structural issues of colonialism, globalization, and food security more generally. This paper examines rice as a staple commodity, one that both reflected and generated inter-colonial dependencies in both ocean worlds, and how that dependency was ultimately fraught. Because the rice trade did not operate in isolation, we also of necessity include some discussion of important non-food crops such as cotton and jute. In the Caribbean, to greater or lesser extents, the colonial plantation economies relied on imported rice and other foodstuffs, needs supplied by other “knots” in the web, especially in the Carolina low country. Other British colonial possessions, too, were developed as “rice bowls” critical to the sustenance of colonized peoples and the support of commercial crops. One of these newer service colonies was British Burma, the formerly sparsely settled delta of the Irrawaddy River. No matter which ocean we center our focus on, and indeed across the “recentered” empire at large, in the Early Modern period rice was a risky business. By making this point we hope to frame a larger conversation about inter-colonial dependencies and the scales at which it is best realized.

The Political Ecology of Plantations from the Ground Up

ABSTRACT 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.

Sugar Economics: A Visual Economy of the Plantation Landscape in Colonial Dominica

This essay is an examination of the processes through which plantation landscapes, bodies, and visual representations of them circulated and interacted in the sugar economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Caribbean island of Dominica. We refer to this process as a visual economy. As an instrument of empire, the visual economy distorted and legitimated the violence of the slave system upon which its rule was founded. By analyzing one plantation settlement known as Sugarloaf plantation, we examine both the mechanism through which it functioned and the local material realities made to be invisible by the visual economy. To accomplish the first, we juxtapose the landscape of Sugarloaf plantation with painted depictions of similar landscapes in Dominica and the Caribbean. The comparison suggests that Sugarloaf was a direct product of the visual economy and European aesthetics. In the second part, we examine the flip side of this visual economy to understand the material realities of enslaved laborers within it. Despite the participation of enslaved laborers in local markets elsewhere on the island, the scant and homogenous material assemblage recovered from the domestic area of the enslaved population at Sugarloaf attests to rigid social boundaries for the enslaved laborers living on this plantation. By refocusing archaeologically on the human scale of broader structural changes we can recognize local variability of experience and see beyond the narrative of imperial rhetoric.