Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean: Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism

By Todd M. Ahlman, Gerald F. Schroedl, Douglas V. Armstrong and 14 more

New perspectives on Caribbean historical archaeology that go beyond the colonial plantation
 
Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean: Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism addresses issues in Caribbean history and historical archaeology such as freedom, frontiers, urbanism, postemancipation life, trade, plantation life, and new heritage. This collection moves beyond plantation archaeology by expanding the knowledge of the diverse Caribbean experiences from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.
 
The essays in this volume are grounded in strong research programs and data analysis that incorporate humanistic narratives in their discussions of Amerindian, freedmen, plantation, institutional, military, and urban sites. Sites include a sample of the many different types found across the Caribbean from a variety of colonial contexts that are seldom reported in archaeological research, yet constitute components essential to understanding the full range and depth of Caribbean history.
 
Contributors examine urban contexts in Nevis and St. John and explore the economic connections between Europeans and enslaved Africans in urban and plantation settings in St. Eustatius. The volume contains a pioneering study of frontier exchange with Amerindians in Dominica and a synthesis of ceramic exchange networks among enslaved Africans in the Leeward Islands. Chapters on military forts in Nevis and St. Kitts call attention to this often-neglected aspect of the Caribbean colonial landscape. Contributors also directly address culture heritage issues relating to community participation and interpretation. On St. Kitts, the legacy of forced confinement of lepers ties into debates of current public health policy. Plantation site studies from Antigua and Martinique are especially relevant because they detail comparisons of French and British patterns of African enslavement and provide insights into how each addressed the social and economic changes that occurred with emancipation.


Contributors
Todd M. Ahlman / Douglas V. Armstrong / Samantha Rebovich Bardoe / Paul Farnsworth / Jeffrey R. Ferguson / R. Grant Gilmore III / Diana González-Tennant / Edward González-Tennant / Barbara J. Heath / Carter L. Hudgins Kenneth G. Kelly / Eric Klingelhofer / Roger H. Leech / Stephan Lenik / Gerald F. Schroedl / Diane Wallman / Christian Williamson

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780817392482

Book preview

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE CARIBBEAN

CARIBBEAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOHISTORY

L. Antonio Curet, Series Editor

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism

Edited by

TODD M. AHLMAN and GERALD F. SCHROEDL

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Baskerville

Cover image: Franklin Brownell, The Beach, St. Kitts, 1913, oil on canvas, 74 × 89 cm. Gift of Edith Wilson, Ottawa, 1923, in memory of Senator and Mrs. W. C. Edwards. National Gallery of Canada; courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2032-4

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9248-2

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Contextualizing Caribbean Historical Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalization

Todd M. Ahlman and Gerald F. Schroedl

1. Kalinagos and Catholics in Dominica before 1763: Archaeology and History of Caribbean Frontiers

Stephan Lenik

2. The Congo Free Black Village on St. Eustatius, Netherlands Caribbean

R. Grant Gilmore III

3. Jamestown, Nevis, and Urban Resilience in the Early English Caribbean

Carter L. Hudgins, Eric Klingelhofer, and Roger H. Leech

4. Inter- and Intraisland Trade of Afro-Caribbean Ware in the Lesser Antilles

Todd M. Ahlman, Gerald F. Schroedl, Barbara J. Heath, R. Grant Gilmore III, and Jeffrey R. Ferguson

5. A Danish Colonial Merchant’s Residence in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas: Material Colonialism and the Intersection of Local and Global Trade at the Bankhus

Christian Williamson and Douglas V. Armstrong

6. The Investigation of Daily Practice of Enslaved Laborer and Sharecropper Households on an Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century French-Caribbean Plantation

Diane Wallman and Kenneth G. Kelly

7. From Slavery to Freedom: Changes in Afro-Antiguan Lifeways, 1790–1840

Samantha Rebovich Bardoe

8. The Military and Institutional Occupations of Charles Fort, St. Kitts, West Indies

Gerald F. Schroedl and Todd M. Ahlman

9. Caribbean Heritage in 3D: New Heritage and Historical Archaeology in Nevis, West Indies

Edward González-Tennant and Diana González-Tennant

10. Current and Future Directions in the Historical Archaeology of the Eastern Caribbean

Paul Farnsworth

References Cited

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

Frontispiece. Location of Caribbean islands mentioned in this volume

1.1. Map of Dominica showing site locations mentioned in the text

1.2. Cayo pottery fragments recovered from Indian River, Dominica

1.3. Map of Grand Bay Quarter, Dominica

2.1. Location of St. Eustatius in the northeastern Caribbean and Site SE 132, the Free Black village

2.2. Site SE 132 plan showing sequence of structure occupation, outdoor cooking area, and earthen shrine

2.3. Plan view of the earthen shrine at SE 132

3.1. Leeward Islands and site of Jamestown on west coast of Nevis

3.2. Plan of excavations and ruins, Jamestown, Nevis

3.3. Carte de L’Isle de Nevis

3.4. Overview of Area I excavation showing superimposed foundations

3.5. Plan of excavation Area I showing superimposed foundations of seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century buildings

3.6. Excavation Area II showing superimposed stone foundations of seventeenth-century Structure 6 under nineteenth-century Structure 7

4.1. Location of islands in study

4.2. Bivariate plot of thorium and cesium showing all groups

4.3. Bivariate plot of thorium and cesium showing the relative similarity between the unassigned samples and the established compositional groups

5.1. Map of 23, 24, 25 Kongens Gade, 1837

5.2. Insurance map of 24, 25 Kongens Gade, 1897

5.3. Map of Bankhus illustrating zones, terraces, and units

5.4. Ceramic column, Unit 16, and stratigraphic profile for Units 16 and 24

6.1. Location of Martinique and Habitation Crève Cœur

6.2. Habitation Crève Cœur on 1770 map

6.3. Site map of Habitation Crève Cœur, Martinique

6.4. Relative abundance of imported ceramics and coco neg by locus and chronological context

6.5. Assemblage composition by class and locus

7.1. Green Castle survey map highlighting areas of archaeological deposits

7.2. Storage vessel fragments from salt-glazed stoneware sherds

8.1. Location of Charles Fort, St. Kitts, West Indies

8.2. Plan of Charles Fort in 1723 based on an original drawing

8.3. Plan of Charles Fort

8.4. Panoramic photograph of leper asylum

8.5. Patient housing, Structure 31, leper asylum

8.6. Postcard showing structures in the northwest corner of the asylum and extensive landscaping and gardens

9.1. Archaeological work at Fort Charles

9.2. Selection of ceramics recovered through excavation at the site of Fort Charles

9.3. Documenting ruined structures at Fort Charles with PhotoScan software

9.4. Blocked-out model of Fort Charles

9.5. Textured guard house

9.6. Fort Charles IQ-GIS prototype showing interactive elements alongside 3D models of excavations and ruins created with photogrammetry

TABLES

2.1. Summary of White, Free Black, and Enslaved Populations on St. Eustatius, 1715–1863

3.1. Nevis Population, 1672–1842

4.1. Sites with Number of Sherd Samples in Afro-Caribbean Ware Study by Island

4.2. Location and Number of Clay Samples in the Study

4.3. Allocation of Samples to Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) Groups

5.1. Census Records for 24, 25 Kongens Gade and Quarter, 1846–1911

6.1. Mean Ceramic Dates for Distinct Deposits

6.2. Number of Identified Specimens and Minimum Number of Individuals of Identified Mammals from Habitation Crève Cœur

6.3. Expected Versus Observed Ratios of Skeletal Portion of Domestic Mammals

6.4. Percentage Minimum Number of Individuals of Common Fish Taxa by Locus from Habitation Crève Cœur

6.5. Relative Abundance of Food-Related Shellfish Taxa (% MNI) by Locus

7.1. Comparison of Foodways Artifacts between Locus 5 during Slavery and Locus 4 Postemancipation

7.2. Items Relating to Food Storage from Locus 4 Excavations

8.1. Description and Dimensions for Individually Numbered Structures at Charles Fort

8.2. Description of Individually Numbered Walls at Charles Fort

Introduction

Contextualizing Caribbean Historical Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalization

Todd M. Ahlman and Gerald F. Schroedl

Archaeological studies of colonialism, capitalism, and globalization are intertwined (Hodos 2017a; Leone and Knauf 2015a; Feinman 2017) and reflect the interconnectedness of these concepts in the study of the last 500 years. This is especially true of the Caribbean, where the colonization and exploitation by European powers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century created one of the epicenters for historic globalization and the expansion of capitalism throughout the world. This is not a new or revolutionary perspective by any means and probably understates the role that the Caribbean played in geopolitical contact, conflict, and exploitation. As Sidney Mintz (1985) suggested, the industrial organization of the Caribbean sugar plantation laid the groundwork for the social, political, and labor organization of the industrial revolution and the subsequent expansion of capitalism. Studies of colonialism, capitalism, and globalization are often Eurocentric in nature, and postcolonial studies have moved beyond the study of Europeans and Euro-Americans to take cross-cultural and bottom-up approaches (see chapters in Hodos [2017b] and Leone and Knaupf [2015b] for examples) that bring a broader analysis and understanding of the past. This in turn accounts for the exercise of agency within and between a diversity of cultural expressions and allows for a variety of disenfranchised groups to assert a distinct identity (Hawley 2015). The Caribbean is an ideal region to study colonialism, capitalism, and globalization, as the major players are European powers, sugar monoculture, and enslaved Africans. Often left out of Caribbean histories is a broad range of actors and places with stories that show that there is a diversity of narratives beyond plantations that played important roles in colonialism, globalization, and capitalism.

Colonization and exploitation of the Caribbean in the sixteenth century began with the search for riches in gold and spices followed by cash crops like tobacco and indigo in the early seventeenth century. These goods were quickly supplanted by sugar monoculture before the third quarter of the seventeenth century. In fact, the popular history of Caribbean colonization, exploitation, globalization, and capitalism is most closely tied to sugar cultivation and the enslavement of Africans. The Caribbean landscape and memory are replete with reminders of the plantation period because most islands are littered with the remains of sugar and other plantations that once made the region one of the wealthiest and contested in the world. David Watts’s research into the historical geography of the Caribbean provides an excellent insight into how pervasive sugar was in the region. Watts (1987:337) found, for example, that by the 1770s approximately 88% of the cultivated land on St. Kitts was in sugar production with the remainder used for grazing or mountain land, and similar patterns were present across the English- and French-speaking Lesser Antilles. Small cotton, coffee, and spice plantations existed on some islands, but like St. Kitts, sugar was supreme and symbolizes the height of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century globalization and capitalism.

Dan Hicks’s study (2007) of St. Kitts plantations led him to conclude that the early period of development on the island was feudal in nature because the spatial arrangement of estates was transplanted from familiar European models of agricultural and landscape development. Although this familiar landscape allowed many early settlers to feel comfortable with their surroundings, the agricultural landscape of the Caribbean was capitalist in nature from the beginning with a focus on production and profits. Marco Meniketti’s landscape study (2015) of Nevis found that the island’s plantations were soon connected with shipping centers and road networks. The island’s villages, towns, and farms were founded as a response to the growth and location of the shipping centers and plantation support. Military sites were established to protect commercial interests rather than the residents’ interests. Meniketti’s study shows how capitalism drove the landscape formation on Nevis and likely did so on most, if not all, Caribbean islands. Cossin and Hauser (2015) argue that the spatial organization of efficiency and surveillance built into the Caribbean plantation landscape and exported to the industrial society of Europe played a crucial role in the rise of the Industrial Revolution.

Sugar’s dominance of Caribbean society, agriculture, and trade resulted in a concomitant large labor force needed to work the cane fields. Caribbean historians and archaeologists are all too familiar with the role that indentured and enslaved labor played in providing the workforce in the sugar fields. Indentured servants were often the first labor force employed on Caribbean coffee, tobacco, indigo, spice, cotton, and sugar plantations and are often overlooked in historical overviews because by the mid-seventeenth century they had been replaced by enslaved Africans who were forcibly brought to work in the sugar cane fields (Beckles 2011). Historian Barry Higman (1995) notes that by 1830 over 70% of the enslaved laborers in the British Caribbean outside Jamaica worked on sugar plantations and, even on Jamaica itself, over half of the enslaved laborers worked on sugar plantations. David Watts (1987) also shows that as sugar monoculture grew in the Caribbean so did the number of enslaved Africans, while the Caribbean’s European population decreased. For instance, on Barbados in 1645 there were 18,130 white people and 5,680 enslaved Africans whereas in 1833 there were 12,797 whites and 80,861 enslaved laborers (311). Similar patterns of population growth and decrease were also present in the French Caribbean, especially Martinique and Guadeloupe, the centers of the French presence in the Caribbean (Boucher 2011).

The movement of people and the movement of goods from around the world to and from the Caribbean are indicative of the globalization phenomenon. Tamar Hodos (2017a) defines globalization as a wide-scale flow of ideas and knowledge alongside the sharing of cultural customs, civil society, practices and the environment (4). Hodos acknowledges that globalization is asymmetrical in the rate and impact of these flows with continual and complex changes in the direction of development and interactions. As a process, globalization has led to complex similarities and awareness in self and placeness in the modern world. Using a postcolonial approach, historical archaeologists first turned to the creolization process of how Amerindian, European, and West African cultures interacted and developed in the modern world. This has been refined through consideration of hybridity or the manner in which transformation is effected through negotiation of the colonizers and colonized. The complexities of cultural interactions, creolization, and hybridization are acutely evident in the Caribbean where global cultures and nations interacted and changed in response to global economies and armed conflicts.

The Caribbean’s sugar economy, history, and culture are often the primary foci of historical and archaeological research at the expense of research on other aspects of the region’s development. As historian Verene Shepherd (2002) notes, Caribbean socioeconomic history displayed a rather totalizing tendency, with historians focusing on the sugar sector and virtually ignoring other agricultural sectors (5). Boucher (2011) echoes this sentiment and points out that many of the smaller French and Dutch islands were not directly tied to the sugar plantation model. Shepherd (2002) further states that the study of the experiences of property owners who were not members of the sugar-planting elite is among the most underresearched areas of Caribbean history (6). The same sentiments can be stated for archaeological research in the Caribbean, especially regarding the British islands. Chapters in the volume Island Lives, edited by Paul Farnsworth (2001) express the need for archaeological research to focus beyond the plantation while simultaneously not ignoring the role that sugar plantations played in Caribbean history. Although he focuses on the British Caribbean, David Watters (2001) notes that urban, military, contact-period, freedman, and European (e.g., white) sites are poorly represented in Caribbean research and hold great potential for future research venues. Delle’s work (1998) in Jamaica and Armstrong’s research (2003) in the Virgin Islands were among the first to meet some of these deficiencies with explicit examinations of the postemancipation period. Previous studies of urban contexts include Smith and Watson’s work (2009) in Barbados and Barka’s findings (2001) on St. Eustatius. More recent research has brought additional focus to the postemancipation period, for example in St. Lucia and Nevis (e.g., Meniketti 2015; Seiter 2016), and also to poor white and mixed-race communities in Barbados and Montserrat (e.g., Reilly 2016; Ryzewski and Cherry 2015). Although much research remains centered on the lives of workers, this volume and other recent publications (see Bates et al. 2016) broaden the inquiry to account for the diversity in the Caribbean historical archaeological record.

The archaeologies of colonization, capitalism, and globalization often focus on worldwide and regional scales, but Gary Feinman (2017) advocates a multiscalar approach to these studies. Large-scale studies often miss the subtleties of localized impacts and contexts by focusing too much on social and material inequality and ignoring the negotiated space of cultural development (Hauser 2011a; Horning 2011). It is important to examine islands of different nationalities and a variety of site types to better understand the negotiated material and social inequalities in the historic Caribbean indicative of colonialism and capitalism. It is also important to take a postcolonial approach to examine these factors from a local perspective that includes a variety of historical and archaeological viewpoints from which to construct different narratives of Caribbean cultural complexity.

Following Feinman’s multiscalar recommendation (2017), this volume examines plantation, frontier, freedman, urban, military, and postemancipation sites from Antigua, Dominica, Martinique, Nevis, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, and St. Thomas. The following chapters cover a wide range of time periods and social situations, demonstrating the Caribbean’s diversity that is seldom explored in archaeological and historical research. Furthermore, we embrace the view now prevalent among historical archaeologist that situates their discourse within the broader unifying contexts of colonialism, capitalism, globalism, and the postcolonial critique (Croucher and Weiss 2011; Hauser 2011a; Leone and Knauf 2015a). Each essay in this volume is intended to expand the range and depth of this dialogue by exploring new topics, new materials, and new interpretations. The chapters begin by examining the frontier situation on Dominica followed by studies on a freedman site on St. Eustatius, urban sites and trade on St. Thomas, St. Kitts, and Nevis, a look at slave and postemancipation slave villages on Antigua and Martinique, and then a review of institution and military sites on St. Kitts and Nevis.

In the first chapter, Stephan Lenik notes that Caribbean frontiers were present in many different ways and forms over several centuries. Frontiers occurred on all Caribbean islands, but their study is nearly invisible in the research of Caribbean archaeology and history (Deagan 1995; Lenik 2009a, 2010). Examining the frontier situation of French settlement on Dominica, considered a Neutral Island and safe haven for the Amerindian Kalinagos, Lenik shows at two sites how Amerindians adapted to the European presence by situating their settlements in places that afforded them protection as well as surveillance points from which to monitor European activities and movements. Lenik notes that French Jesuits on Dominica, which was not formally settled by Europeans until 1763, established not only churches but also plantations to help fund religious and personal projects. Lenik’s research shows how a capitalist-colonial foothold was achieved in Dominica, reminding Caribbean historical archaeologist not to exclude Amerindians from regional culture formation in the early colonial period. This study may encourage similar research on other islands and provide one avenue for Kalinago people to participate in the construction of a Caribbean historical narrative.

West Indian historian Elsa Goveia (1965) suggests that over 50% of the white population across the Caribbean lived in towns and urban areas. Her research shows, for example, that in 1788 over 80% of the white population on St. Kitts lived in towns, and Welch (2002) believes that a large proportion of the Caribbean free black population lived in urban areas by the end of the eighteenth century. R. Grant Gilmore III’s chapter on the Congo Free Black Village on St. Eustatius (Statia) provides a rare look into not only the lives of free blacks but also of a village established and occupied by free blacks. As Gilmore notes, Statia is a Dutch island that once was one of the most important capitalistic and globalization centers in the New World. The island, especially the warehouses and dwellings in the urban area of Oranjestad, have been the focus of archaeological investigations since the 1970s, making Statia one of the most intensively studied Caribbean islands. Gilmore shows that throughout the period of slavery and into the postemancipation era the Free Black village inhabitants of one particular housing lot built a series of structures. The earliest is comparable with structures occupied by enslaved Africans, and the latest is similar to many of the Dutch-occupied houses on Statia. The lot’s occupants, however, maintained a use of space reflecting traditional West Indian/African cultural traditions. The material culture reflects European-style consumerism of the time but also strong adherence to Caribbean/African customs and traditions—all within the norms of Dutch colonial culture. Gilmore’s analysis contrasts sharply with research that is singularly focused on European and enslaved African lives on Statia as well as across the Caribbean, and there is no doubt from Gilmore’s account that free and enslaved Africans found numerous avenues for participating and thriving in Statia’s capitalist economy.

With the introduction and expansion of the plantation economy, urban centers quickly developed and grew across the Caribbean. Port Royal, Jamaica, or Havana, Cuba, for example, are commonly known West Indian cites, but because of their size and complexity these places are more the exception than the rule. Smaller villages and towns like Jamestown, Nevis, and Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, that formed at coastal anchorages and shipping centers are more typical of Caribbean urban centers. These towns and villages were microcosms of capitalism and globalization where warehouses held locally produced sugar, coffee, spices, and other commodities before being shipped to North and South American and European markets as well as markets, stores, and mercantiles that supplied island residents with European and American goods. The town and urban centers were also home to the merchants, doctors, lawyers, clergy, and others who supported and profited from their connections to the plantation network.

Some villages, towns, and cities have a long history, while others, like Jamestown, Nevis, reflect the fortunes and distress of the sugar trade and slowly vanished from the landscape. Jamestown, however, has a larger place in Nevisian lore because oral accounts and scant written records concerning the town maintain that it was the victim of a tsunami and was swept into the ocean. Carter L. Hudgins, Eric Klingelhofer, and Roger H. Leech explore the fate of Jamestown, and by dispelling some of the postcolonial myth making about the site, contextualize the town in two related ways. Most obvious is that Jamestown played a vital role in the development of Nevis’s colonial plantation enterprise, making it a key element in both the economic and the political life of the colony. Second is how the town’s architecture and its material culture were altered as the island’s economy declined from demographic collapse and geopolitical conflicts, while experiencing subsequent building resurgence as the economy improved in the nineteenth century.

The sugar trade represents an external economy that, as mentioned, dominates the historical studies of Caribbean economies. Since the early 2000s, archaeologists have moved beyond the sugar-based economy and have begun to focus on island economies and the trade of locally made pottery. The role of Afro-Caribbean ware, a pottery produced and exchanged by enslaved and freed Africans, has become a critical aspect in the study of internal island economies because it is a direct tie to enslaved Africans and a tangible marker that survives in the archaeological record. As Todd M. Ahlman, Gerald F. Schroedl, Barbara J. Heath, R. Grant Gilmore III, and Jeffery R. Ferguson show in chapter 4 on the trade of Afro-Caribbean ware, pottery production and exchange were not limited to internal economies and reveal important information on intra- and interisland trade in which enslaved and freed Africans were engaged. From studying Afro-Caribbean ware from 24 sites on seven islands and 23 clay samples from five islands, they show that pottery was widely transported throughout the Caribbean and that people had differential access to these pottery wares. This makes it clear that enslaved Africans participated in the capitalist economy as they manufactured, distributed, and sold these wares, and that at least in the northern Leeward Islands, Nevis likely was the center of this industry.

The influence of European merchants is seen throughout the Caribbean; however, the material culture of these people is poorly known. In their chapter on the Bankhus site on St. Thomas, Christian Williamson and Douglas V. Armstrong describe the material record of a Danish colonial merchant property. They show that the material culture of urban properties in the Caribbean often has a complex history tied to changes in residents, owners, and hurricanes and that merchant properties represent complex urban contexts where people of different ethnicities and socioeconomic standing often lived in close proximity. The material culture from the Bankhus illustrates the intersection of colonialism, ethnicity, and consumerism in a Caribbean urban setting.

Although this volume primarily focuses on nonplantation contexts, we would be remiss if worker villages from sugar plantations were not presented. The term worker village is used here because the sites examined in Antigua and Martinique cover both slave and postemancipation eras. Diane Wallman and Kenneth G. Kelly examine five occupation areas from the Habitation Crève Cœur, an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century sugar plantation on Martinique, to address slave and freedman sharecropper subsistence and purchasing habits. Samantha Rebovich Bardoe studies the slave village and postemancipation laborer village at the Green Castle Estate on Antigua. These chapters show the similarities and differences in how slavery and the postemancipation periods were perceived by French and British Caribbean governments and elites. Wallman and Kelly’s assessment finds intrasite differences in access to goods and foodstuffs as well as diachronic changes in ceramic use that reflect greater freedoms in purchasing power, especially in the postemancipation era. Bardoe found similar patterns on Antigua, but her research suggests differences in how the government and the freedmen themselves adjusted to life in the postemancipation period. Both chapters demonstrate that enslaved Africans, despite the restrictions imposed on them, found ways to successfully participate in the capitalist market economy and how plantation owners encouraged them and benefited from the cost savings of provisioning their slaves. Emancipated slaves, as a result, were better positioned to participate and profit once wage labor conditions were established.

The multinational nature of the Caribbean islands often meant that Caribbeans were involved in the conflicts and disagreements of their European colonizers, which meant that to protect themselves on many islands people constructed extensive and often massive forts and armaments along the coasts. Forts, such as Charles Fort on St. Kitts and Fort Charles on Nevis, protected the towns and villages where commodities were stored before shipment and guarded the ports and anchorage where cargo was placed on ships. Charles Fort on St. Kitts was established in the 1670s by the British to protect the sugar port and anchorage of Sandy Point, a valuable shipping harbor in the British sugar world that also happened to be adjacent to the French-occupied lands. Charles Fort played an important role until it was eclipsed by the fortifications at the nearby Brimstone Hill and was occupied until the 1850s. In 1890 the fort was repurposed as the leper asylum later known as the Hansen Home. Of the numerous leper asylums in the Caribbean, St. Kitts’s Hansen Home was one of the largest and longest-used facilities. As Gerald F. Schroedl and Todd M. Ahlman show, the history and archaeology of the Hansen Home are representative of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century institutions devoted to the care of lepers. In their chapter they describe the buildings and fort/asylum landscape that are representative of military and institutional attitudes toward health and confinement in the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century on St. Kitts. Their evidence suggests that attitudes toward the leper asylum inmates, as they are called in historical records, are consistently aimed toward easing the effects of institutionalization through housing, meals, tasks, and gardening. The repurposing of Charles Fort was consistent with postemancipation health care and demography as societal organization became less plantation centered. Perhaps more importantly, their essay has relevance for the St. Kitts postcolonial narrative of contemporary social status and health care.

Edward González-Tennant and Diana González-Tennant take a new approach to the study of Fort Charles on Nevis. Fort Charles was established in the seventeenth century to protect the Charlestown anchorage, which at the time was an important harbor because of Nevis’s role in the sugar trade (see also chapter 3 by Hudgins, Klingelhofer, and Leech). While Fort Charles played an important role in Nevis’s history, its place in the Nevisians’ collective memory is not well positioned. The González-Tennants discuss how they have forged a relationship with the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society to incorporate local interests into their research. The focus of their chapter is on the development of new digital recordation and interpretation techniques that aim to bring the history and importance of Fort Charles to a wider local and international audience. As the González-Tennants point out, the future of Caribbean research will only be meaningful in the long term once archaeologists begin incorporating the research interests of local groups within their own research interests. Their technological approach to site interpretation allows the Nevisian public and culture heritage interests to construct a variety of site narratives from which to interpret their own colonial and postcolonial history.

The volume concludes with Paul Farnsworth’s review and discussion of each chapter. His remarks tie together how each contribution provides new insights into the roles urban, military, institutional, and plantation sites played in the Caribbean’s historical development. Farnsworth closes his summary with important recommendations for the future of Caribbean area studies by addressing some of the differences in research interests of North American and European archaeologists and the interests of local residents. His advice on working closely with local communities should be heeded by all archaeologists working in the region.

The essays in this volume examine diverse geographical, chronological, and archaeological contents and contexts. The contributors explore aspects of social and economic differences, relating mostly to the transformation from slavery to emancipation when former slaves, their former masters, and colonial governments were compelled to create patterns of economic