Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean
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BOOK REVIEW
Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean James A. Delle and Elizabeth C. Clay (editors), University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2019. 296 pp., 75 figs., 4 tables, list of contributors, index. $95.00 cloth Matthew C. Reilly Accepted: 24 June 2020 # Society for Historical Archaeology 2020
Climate change and development are two of the largest contributing factors to the changing face of the Caribbean landscape. While the former has catastrophic, and increasingly frequent, consequences that result in the loss of life, both processes are detrimental to the built landscape, often including the loss of structures with local, regional, and global heritage value. As many authors of this volume point out, these factors, along with many others, make it increasingly difficult to visualize, document, and understand the domestic landscapes of slavery, and their afterlives, in the contemporary Caribbean. Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean is therefore an important, thorough, timely collection that will serve as a useful resource for practitioners in the field interested in the diversity and reality of the Caribbean spaces that the enslaved created and inhabited. Building on pioneering archaeological work from the 1970s and 1980s, largely concentrated in the English speaking Caribbean, this volume not only broadens the geographic scope of archaeological studies of domestic landscapes of slavery in the region, but simultaneously highlights the diversity of architectural forms and spatial organization present on individual islands. The interand intra-island diversity of the built landscape of Caribbean spaces was, as evidenced by the chapters in this collection, very much contingent upon the tension
M. C. Reilly (*) Department of Anthropology, City College of New York, New York, NY, U.S.A. e-mail: [email protected]
between the world planters and authorities sought to create and the spaces that materialized based on the agency demonstrated by the enslaved. Through an incorporation of the environment and ecology into this dualism, contributors to this volume also highlight the forces that shaped and shifted the domestic landscapes of slavery over time. The data-rich chapters in this volume painstakingly pivot between the intimacies of daily life within a household, the architectural techniques and signatures of domestic structures, and the broader geopolitical, colonial, socioeconomic, and environmental forces that shaped the landscapes inhabited by the enslaved. For the former, archaeological evidence reflects mundane yet meaningful activities such as yard sweeping (Hayden F. Bassett), the maintenance and upkeep of boarded homes (James A. Delle and Kristen R. Fellows), and cooking and baking (Alicia Odewale and Meredith D. Hardy, Delle and Fellows, Zachary J. M. Beier). The era of abolition and rebellion (most notably the Haitian Revolution) from the 1780s through the 1840s witnessed some of the most dynamic transformations to landscapes of the enslave
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