While the layout of plantation slave villages demonstrate a great deal of planter control, the private landscapes of enslaved peoples offer insights into the activities and experiences where the reach of the planter was more limited. Archaeological investigations of the caves and gullies surrounding St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation in St. Peter, Barbados offer insights into the activities that some enslaved plantation workers pursued. The gullies winding between St. Nicholas Abbey, the tenantry of Moore Hill, Pleasant Hall plantation and other estates in St. Peter contain a series of caves, many of which possess material culture, including ceramics, clay tobacco pipes, and black bottle glass. These caves, as liminal spaces on the landscape between adjoining plantations, appear to have served as meeting areas for enslaved peoples and later free workers. The privacy these spaces afforded spurred physical mobility and social interaction between enslaved peoples from surrounding villages, and may have fostered activities that were not permitted in the public sphere, such as gaming and leisure. Gullies are thus viewed as conduits and corridors that connected communities in the plantation-dominated landscape of Barbados and offered a temporary respite from the challenges of plantation life.

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Epistemologies of space, environment, dwelling, and the body are essential to the study of past individuals through their constructed spaces. Most important to this study is the notion that one's knowledge of the world is integral to the ways in which one dwells within it. This paper explores colonial English epistemologies of climate through an analysis of dwelling spaces of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. I consider Early-Modern perceptions of air, temperature, and the body as vital to understanding the various ways in which colonial places were defined and shaped. Further, I employ an analytical method known as Buildings Information Modeling (BIM) to understand the implications of seventeenthcentury pit house construction, investigating the ways in which individuals interact with an environment, constructing and dwelling through a particular way of knowing the world. To do so, I operationalize and expand upon Tim Ingold's concept of the "weather-world" to understand the relationship between climate and indoor space in the British Atlantic. This paper ultimately demonstrates how archaeological evidence speaks to the material ways in which people manipulate their experience of place, to not only experience the "weather-world," but shape it to fit the epistemological context that creates a 'knowledge of place'. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Dedication List of Figures This Thesis is dedicated to my parents, Jeb and Diane, for their continued love, support, and inspiration.