Scale Locality and the Caribbean Historical Archaeology

Abstract

Historical archaeologists have become increasingly concerned with regional analysis focusing on the interconnections between different archaeological sites in order to develop a better sense of social relations. This development is in part due to the realization of many years of research and subsequent topical and theoretical syntheses. It also reflects a shifting concern in research towards fluidity of landscape and translocality (Hicks in World Archaeol 37: 373-391, 2005;Lightfoot K (2005). University of California, Berkeley; Orser CE Jr (1996) A historical archaeology of the modern world. Plenum, New York; Wilkie LA, Farnsworth P (2005) Sampling many pots: an archaeology of memory and tradition at a Bahamian Plantation. University Press of Florida, Gainesville). The Caribbean as a world area highlights the need for broader regional analyses where tensions between local specificities and global/translocal processes are mediated. These tensions have been explored through discussions of identity, agency, colonialism and political economy. In this volume we explore the utility of scale of analysis in the framing of colonial landscapes between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in the Caribbean. Contributors to this volume have concentrated on the ways in which scale as a concept is explicitly analyzed or implicitly employed to shape how we as archaeologists focus on topics associated with the African Diaspora in the Caribbean to draw out narratives of everyday life.

Using Airborne LiDAR Survey to explore Historic-era archaeological landscapes of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean

“…Although the technique may be new to the region, the scope of regional analysis and the questions posed about the manipulation of landscapes in the Caribbean during the colonial period are not. Caribbean historical archaeologists have long been focused on mapping land-use patterns at regional and island-wide scales to understand relationships of control over social and economic spaces, as well as corresponding shifts in settlement patterns and social relations during and after the plantation era (Hauser 2009). On St. John, Armstrong and colleagues (2009: 96) have used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to combine geospatial data with archival records and survey finds to identify two shifting land-use patterns across the island between 1780 and 1800.…”