Abstract

Betty’s Hope Plantation, on the island of Antigua has been excavated by California State University, Chico, since 2007. The site incorporates a wide-range of diverse use-areas including the Great House, a Rum Distillery, and Slave Quarters. Excavations have revealed that every area of the plantation represents a unique community with distinct material culture. In the 2014 season, researchers discovered a midden that appears to have been utilized by two of these diverse plantation communities. The midden, located between the Great House and the Slave Village, was most likely employed by members from both areas. It therefore represents a context that incorporates vastly different cultural expressions and practices on the plantation. The Codrington family kept extensive plantation records revealing their elite status and identity while simultaneously overlooking the slave population, whose characteristics and historical knowledge are now limited to the remains found in the midden and other archaeological contexts. This evidence, largely in the form of Afro-Antiguan wear, indicates that those enslaved peoples incorporated their own cultural customs through the means of ceramic production. In this Independent Study, I discuss the collective identities on the plantation that are represented through the material culture in this unique midden and how I teased out the cultural expressions of those most underrepresented peoples who maintained a distinct cultural identity throughout the largest forced migration in history. The result will be a deconstruction of the plantation as an economic machine to achieve an understanding of the mundane details of individualism.

Advisor

Navarro-Farr, Olivia

Department

Archaeology

Disciplines

Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology

Keywords

Creolization, Afro-Antiguan Ceramics

Publication Date

2016

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis Exemplar

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© Copyright 2016 Katelyn Schoenike