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In 2017, Hurricane Maria exposed a colonial-era settlement at LaSoye on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Evidence suggests that this was a seventeenth-to eighteenth-century Dutch trading factory built over an earlier Kalinago settlement, and a place of early interaction between Indigenous peoples and Europeans.

In the plantation settlements of the Americas, enslaved Africans and their descendants were compelled to create a system of foodways that provided sufficient nutrition for their survival and that could be assembled out of the resources available to them. The ability of the enslaved plantation workers to do this is a testament to their creativity, and the cuisine they developed lives on today in the creole foods of the former slave colonies. The foods, the methods of their procurement, the methods of preparation, and the artifacts used in that preparation consist of a blend of African, European, and American influences reflecting environment, cultural heritage, and economics. In this article, we integrate ethnohistorical and historical documents with archaeological materials from excavations at two plantation slave villages, one in Guadeloupe and one in Martinique, in the context of Caribbean creole foodways within the French West Indies.

Throughout the modern day Caribbean, artisanal fishing constitutes an important part of domestic subsistence and household economies. Many of the traditional fishing practices on the islands today were established during the Colonial Period, as enslaved Africans and their descendants developed social, economic, and subsistence strategies to persist under the plantation system. The historical record provides little insight into the day-to-day experiences of these enslaved laborers, including their subsistence regimes and practices. Fishing by slaves in the colonial French Antilles is portrayed in the historic literature as a practice reserved primarily for an “elite” group of fisherman held on wealthy plantations. Archaeology provides insight into the pieces of history left out of the written record and offers valuable information regarding the everyday lives of the enslaved peoples and communities underrepresented in this record. This article presents the results of the zooarchaeological analysis of faunal remains recovered from enslaved laborer and sharecropper occupations at Habitation Crève Cœur, an eighteenth–nineteenth century sugar plantation on the island of Martinique. The data reveal that fishing was an important economic activity for the slaves on this plantation and that the practice of fishing was likely more of a communal act than one for a privileged few. Furthermore, analysis indicates that fishing techniques that continue on the island today originated centuries ago, traditions developed by enslaved laborers living under the severe constraints of the oppressive plantation system.

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