The Political Ecology of Plantations from the Ground Up

ABSTRACT

Little work has been done to examine the political ecology and environmental legacy of sugar colonies in the Caribbean. Material excavated from the Morne Patate plantation in southern Dominica occupied from the late seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century offer a perfect opportunity to examine the intersections between Caribbean colonial enterprises and the domestic economises of enslaved households. Analysis of macrobotanical remains associated with the houses, gardens, and provision grounds of the enslaved inhabitants at Morne Patate reveal a mixture of African, American, and European cereals, fruits, and vegetables. Maize (Zea mays) dominates the assemblage, and the recovery of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and millet (Pennisetum glaucum) indicate a concern with high yield cereals and perhaps experimentation with producing crops in a range of local microenvironments. Remains of several coffee cherries (Coffea sp.) from a household context suggest that the enslaved inhabitants at Morne Patate were producing some amount of coffee either for personal consumption or possibly for sale at local markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeobotany
• Caribbean
• coffee
• food
• horticulture
• sugar plantations

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Lennox Honychurch, Island Heritage Initiative, Dominica, for his invaluable help. Simon and Wendy Walsh and Christina Garner are thanked for their invaluable assistance with logistics. We also thank Christopher Morehart, Arizona State University, for assistance and access to his archaeobotanical laboratory and comparative collections.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Oas is a PhD candidate in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She is an archaeologist who specialises in palaeoethnobotany in West Africa and the US Southwest. Her research broadly examines the social and political importance of food, and focuses on relationships between daily food practices and processes of social integration and transformation. She received her MA from Simon Fraser University in 2013.

Mark W. Hauser is an associate professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. He is a historical archaeologist who specialises in materiality, slavery, and inequality. His research focuses on the African Diaspora and colonial contexts in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in Atlantic and Indian Oceans. He is the author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Local Economies in Eighteenth-century Jamaica and has co-edited several volumes including Out Of Many, One: Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica and Islands at the Crossroads: Interisland and Continental Interaction in the Caribbean. He received his PhD from Syracuse University in 2001.

Additional information

Funding

Research on Dominica was funded through the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation (NSF “Chronological Change in Domestic Economy and Provisioning Strategy” Award 1419672).