Douglas V. Armstrong Recovering an Early 18Th

DOUGLAS V. ARMSTRONG RECOVERING AN EARLY 18TH CENTURY AFRO-JAMAICAN COMMUNITY: ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SLAVE VILLAGE AT SEVILLE, JAMAICA INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH AT SEVILLE The slave village site at Seville plantation (occupied circa 1670-1900) was part of a large British colonial sugar estate consisting of over 2000 acres consolidated soon after the British took the island from the Spanish in 1655 (Figure 1). The estate is located as St. Ann's Bay on the north coast of Jamaica. It consists of a strip of land extending from the shore to the mountainous interior of the island. Sugar was grown on gently sloping tract of fertile land along the coast, the slave village was located further inland, behind the planters great house, on a small piece of land at the edge of the lush tropical forest that rises sharply to the south1,2 The slave settlement at Seville estate was one of the "finalists" in the intensive selection process that resulted in the excavations at Drax Hall (Armstrong 1983, 1985, 1990). It met all criteria for excavation: excellent documentation, detailed maps, slave lists and other records dealing directly with occupants of the estates Afro-Jamaican settlement. A comparative study of Drax and Seville was considered but the realities of time, energy, and money limited excavations to Drax Hall where more complete documentation was available and where the foundations of slave housing were slightly more visible as flat anomalies on the slopes of gently rolling hills. While excavating Drax the importance of archaeological research at Seville became more and more apparent for reasons not entirely tied to the past, but rather by the way in which the history of Seville was being presented in the present. Seville Estate had been acquired by the Government of Jamaica for the establishment of a National Historic Park. The estate and the adjoining bay have witnessed the full spectrum of Jamaican history and prehistory. Arawak Indians lived in at least three sites on the estate, Christopher Columbus beached two ships and lived for more than a year in the area, the second European occupied city in the New World, Sevilla la Nueva occupied a section of the property in the sixteenth century, a major sugar estate was build by British planters, and more than 250 persons of African descent were brought tin to work the estate for nearly three centuries first as slaves and later as free laboring tenants. It could be argued that few places in the Americas have such a long and culturally diverse history. Certainly the fact that the estate was acquired as a National Park, indicates that aspects of the historic significance of the area have been recognized. After acquiring the estate the eighteenth century Great House was partially restored, surveys and excavations were conducted to locate the Spanish and Amer-lndian sites, and international funding was sought to harold the Spanish period, the plantations Great House and works, and even the Amer-lndian villages which might have had interactions with Columbus. Unfortunately, the Afro-Jamaican village was not afforded a significant place in the history of Seville. Despite the fact that a survey of the Afro-Jamaican settlement 344 was conducted in 1980 and its boundaries reconfirmed in 1981. I was appalled to find that the ruins of houses were being destroyed in 1982 in order that sod could be obtained for the grassy area in front of the Great House. For more than three hundred of its five hundred years of history Afro- Jamaicans made up the majority population of the estate, and their history should be included along with that of the occupants of the Great House, the sugar and pimento works, and the earlier Spanish and Native American settlers. The significance of excluding Afro-Jamaicans from the interpretation of Seville as made clear by the sod incident, and the significance of seeking and including information on the settlement was made poignant during a site walk over with Carpy Rose in 1982. Mr. Rose was born (circa 1890) in one of the last houses remaining on the estate. As I describe in the preface to a book forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press (Armstrong 1990), Mr. Rose had been interviewed by several scholars interested in what he knew about his class mate, Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican National Hero (Armstrong 1990). He was surprised that I was interested in him and the place where he was brought up, and not primarily in Mr. Garvey. When I asked him to show me his boyhood home he responded with a smile and said that he would show me where he grew up but that I would not find anything there; yet when we arrived he recognized a tree from the yard and as we were leaving he said that as a small boy he had lost a special toy, he wondered if archaeologists would find it. The mere fact that attention is paid to a subject, in this case an Afro-Jamaican settlement, alters the perception of the importance of the village. In the process history is broadened to acknowledge the contributions of all Jamaicans. It is this goal, of including the settlement in the interpretation of history at Seville, which drew me back to Jamaica in 1987. In the past my proposals for research have been defined in terms of significance to the study of cultural transformations. As such they are subject to the same set of evaluations, which led me to choose Drax Hall for initial inquiry. In other words, there are many places where these research questions can be addressed, however, the significance of this site is linked with a broader interpretation of history. If the Afro-Jamaican settlement at Seville National Historic Park is not studied the importance of Afro-Jamaicans would not be acknowledged by those who interpret the past to the people of the present. To date only a few of the many thousands of black settlements in the Caribbean have been explored, this represents only a few hundred of the several million persons of African descent who lived in, and help create, the rich and diverse cultural landscape found today in the Americas. Within and in spite of the institution of slavery, blacks lived, worked, and died. Not only did they harvest the crops which were bring great wealth to the burgeoning empires of Europe, but they also created their own internal cultural systems and the cultural foundations for the modern peoples of the Caribbean. BACKGROUND TO STUDIES IN PLANTATION ARCHAEOLOGY In recent years there has been a réévaluation of the past by social scientists including both anthropologists and historians and a growing recognition that many sectors of the population throughout the America's had been overlooked. The most populous of these groups are the Afro-Americans. During the period of slavery (16th 345 through 19th centuries) some 12 million Africans were forcibly brought to the western hemisphere (Curtin 1969). In the Caribbean, as in the Southeastern United States, these blacks were forces into a system of chattel slavery with a significant proportion placed on colonial frontier plantations for the primary purpose of producing cash crops like sugar and tobacco for an export market. Evidence of internal social and cultural systems operating within and in spite of the external forces of colonial slave institutions is evident in surviving and revitalized oral traditions, music, and dance, clothing, and spoken dialects (Franklin 1969; Herskovits 1958 [1941]; Mintz 1974; Brathwaite 1978; Grahan and Knight 1979). Certainly their are descriptive accounts, which stress the importance of these traits within black settlements (Long 1774; Beckford 1790; Edwards 1793; Anonymous 1797). These accounts are extremely useful but they are not the only record available. For the period prior to the nineteenth century there is another major source of primary, first hand, information: the archaeological record. Materials that were used, broken, and discarded, along with the remains of the structures in which Afro-Jamaicans lived and the foods that they ate, have been persevered in the ground. This record, described by Deetz (1977) as the "many things forgotten", can be reconstructed through the study of artifacts and structures that survive (Otto 1985; Ferguson 1978; Kelso 1984; Handler and Lange 1978; Garrow 1981; Singleton 1985; Armstrong 1990). In the Caribbean an extensive literature on slaves and slavery has been generated by anthropologists and historians who have been keenly sensitive to the study of the institution of slavery and role of Afro-Americans in the formation of rich and diverse Caribbean cultures (Herskovits and Herskovits 1947; Craton 1978; Curtin 1969; Davenport 1961; Dunn 1973; Goveia 1965; Hall 1976; Handler 1974; Mintz 1955, 1974, 1985a, and 1985b; Mintz and Hall 1960; Mintz and R. Price 1976; Higman 1976, 1979, 1984; Crahan and Knight 1979; Kiple and King 1981; and Kiple 1984). The amount of archaeological work focusing on Afro-American populations in the Caribbean is quite small in contrast to the Southeastern United States, but it is growing. Mathewson (1972a, 1972b, 1973), hypothesized the presence of distinctive Afro-Caribbean ceramic and craft traditions, which have been substantiated by several scholars (Gartley 1979; Armstrong 1983, 1989; Heath 1989). In addition to Mathewson's study, research in Jamaica has included studies of New Montpelier (Riordan 1973; Higman 1974, 1976b; and Higman and Aarons 1978) and Drax Hall Plantations. In Barbados, Jerome Handler along with Frederick Lange and their associates have combined archaeological and historical interpretation of excavations at the slave cemetery at Newton Plantation (Handler and Lange 1978, 1979; and Handler et. al. 1979; Handler and Corruccini 1983, 1986). The Barbadian studies demonstrated the importance of using historical materials to understand the development of Afro-Caribbean living systems and thave provided considerable information on customs, diet, and mortality as derived from analyses of burials from Newton Plantation.

Load more