Creole Cultures of the Caribbean: Historical Archaeology in the French West Indies

Abstract

Historical archaeology is a relatively recent development in the French West Indies, in contrast to the Anglophone Americas where for over 30 years, historical archaeologists have investigated the sites of plantation villages in the United States and in the Caribbean to seek insights into the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted to and survived the horrors of slavery, and created unique and vibrant Creole cultures. Although plantations have been archaeologically investigated in the former French possessions of the United States, their Caribbean counterparts, and particularly the enslaved population who labored on them, have only recently become a focus of archaeological research. Yet the historical setting and development of plantation slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean was necessarily distinct from both the British Caribbean and from North American French colonial establishments. This paper discusses the state of historical archaeology in the French West Indies, with particular reference to plantation archaeology in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This research identifies some of the unique aspects of the economic and historical context of slavery on French Caribbean plantations.

The early colonial atlantic world: New insights on the African Diaspora from isotopic and ancient DNA analyses of a multiethnic 15th–17th century burial population from the Canary Islands, Spain

“…Concurrently, the funeral ritual observed in Finca Clavijo can be considered as an indicator of cultural resistance and the capacity for agency of a population that was able to generate procedures of material and symbolic representation of their identity, despite their social marginalization (Ewen, ; Groovert, ; Kelly, ).…”

Practicing and Preaching Quakerism: Creating a Religion of Peace on a Slavery‐Era Plantation

“…This was for economic reasons, minimizing travel times, but plantation landscapes were also carefully managed to allow for oversight (Delle , ; Higman ). The pattern has also been noted in French colonial sites, where desires for separation competed with a need for surveillance and control (Kelly :395), and in the U.S. South (Joseph :59; Orser :324).…”

Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism

“…In particular, studies have highlighted the significance of household activities , village household organization , the use of gardens and provision grounds (Pulsipher 1994;Handler and Wallman 2014), foodways (Armstrong 1999), ceramic production, consumption, and markets (Wilkie 1999(Wilkie , 2000Loftfield 2001;Hauser , 2011aFinch 2013;Lenik 2009), religious beliefs and burial practices (Handler and Lange 1978), alcohol consumption (Smith 2008a), marronage (Agorsah 2007), localized economic activities (Gibson 2009;Handler and Wallman 2014;Galle 2011), acts of resistance (Delle , 2014, and the creation of localized "creole" cultures (Armstrong 2003;Kelly 2008), to name a few. As a framework, archaeologists have utilized a multiscalar approach to demonstrate the active roles played by the enslaved in forging lives for themselves that challenged planter control and, via these escapes, offered them access to diverse socioeconomic realms.…”