Creole Materialities: Archaeological Explorations of Hybridized Realities on a North American Plantation

Abstract

This paper explores the hybridized realities of European, Native American and Afro-Caribbean/Afro-American residents of Sylvester Manor, New York and Constant Plantation, Barbados during the seventeenth century. It draws on archaeological and landscape evidence from two plantations that were owned and operated by different members of the same family during the seventeenth century. One of plantations, known as Sylvester Manor, encompassed all 8,000 acres of Shelter Island, New York. It was established in 1652 primarily to help in the provisioning of two large sugar plantations on Barbados, Constant and Carmichael plantations. Sylvester Manor was operated by Nathaniel Sylvester; an Englishman who spent the first twenty years of life living in Amsterdam where his father was a merchant. Constant and Carmichael plantations were operated by his brother Constant Sylvester. Both the Barbados and New York plantations relied upon a labor force of enslaved Afro-Caribbean's. Archaeological evidence from Sylvester Manor has also revealed that Native American laborers played a prominent role in the daily activities of this northern plantation. Material and landscape evidence reveal the construction of hybridized identities that in the case of Barbados, are still part of the fabric of a postcolonial reality. Evidence from Sylvester Manor provides detailed insights into the construction of hybridized identities under the exigencies of a plantation economy whose global connections are dramatically visible in the archaeological record.

Clothing and colonialism: The Dungiven costume and the fashioning of early modern identities

“…Manhanset labourers on the seventeenth-century Sylvester Manor plantation on Shelter Island, New York, may have employed the rolled copper pieces found in excavations to augment their clothing (Hayes, 2013a: 113). The Manhanset at Sylvester Manor were part of a pluralistic community incorporating Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in which the negotiation of identity was mediated through material culture, exemplified by hybridised ceramic vessels exhibiting European style handles but employing Native- and African-derived technology (Mrozowski, 2010; Hayes, 2013b). And just as the English in Ireland appropriated local fashions, so too did colonisers in other lands.…”

Colonialismo na arqueologia histórica

“…: CUSICK, 2000;DAWDY, 2000;FERGUSON, 1992;LOREN, 2004;MULLINS;PAYNTER, 2000). Acentuando ainda mais esse declínio,Richard (2014, p. 45) sustenta trocar explicitamente "crioulização" por "hibridismo cultural", embora não seja raro encontrar ambos os termos sendo usados de forma intercambiável(MROZOWSKI, 2010). VanValkenburgh (2013, figura 1) ilustra bem esse giro terminológico.Portanto, com base na acentuada crítica dePalmié (2006) e as conexões muitas vezes esguias realizadas entre crioulização e colonialismo, o termo crioulização não é mais usado neste trabalho.espaço" entre classificações dicotômicas tanto no discurso como na prática, destacando a criatividade cultural e a subversão nas práticas coloniais de dominação, além de ajudar a distinguir entre mudanças intencionais e não intencionais nos mundos materiais e culturais, levando arqueólogo(a)s a reconsiderarem as origens e os significados dos objetos e práticas materiais.…”

Dynamics of change in multiethnic societies: An archaeological perspective from colonial North America

“…The constituents of these villages changed significantly over time because of devastating mortality rates and the continual recruitment of new neophytes from farther and farther away from the missions to replace those that died (13). The residential quarters in plantations might house Africans from diverse homelands, African-Americans, as well as Native Americans whose composition varied through time (85)(86)(87)(88)(89).…”