I draw on research from Jamaica and Dominica to track economic networks through analysis of ceramic assemblages from house yards of enslaved laborers. Ceramics produced in Europe and used by colonial subjects have been used to reinforce narratives in which empires jealously guarded mercantile trade regimes. The presence of local coarse earthenware made and used by people of African extraction allows an analysis of more localized networks-some of which transgressed social and political boundaries. Careful analysis allows us to extend this observation to some European-made ceramics as well. As such, ceramic assemblages speak to how boundaries were enacted differently depending on the status of the actors engaged in these transactions. Attention to the variegated economic practices of colonial residents provides one mechanism to map the distances between how colonies were imagined in the imperial center and the practices of everyday life of people living at the boundaries of empires. [slavery, empires, trade networks, African diaspora, Colono Ware] ISLAND TERRITORIES AND COLONIAL BOUNDARIES

An archaeological GIS is used to examine the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape of St. John, US Virgin Islands. Land use patterns are reconstructed using a combination of historic maps, tax records, and survey reconnaissance. The study demonstrates significant, heretofore undocumented, transitions taking place that reflect dynamic cultural and economic change within Danish West Indian plantation society that includes a significant trend towards land ownership by free-colored St. Johnians more than a half a century before emancipation. These venues of freedom are discussed in relation to broader patterns of estate consolidation and economic shifts.

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.

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