Colonial iron in context: the Trianon slave shackle from Mauritius
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Colonial iron in context: the Trianon slave shackle from Mauritius Krish Seetah 1 & Thomas Birch 2 & Diego Calaon 1,3 & Saša Čaval 1,4
Received: 5 March 2015 / Accepted: 30 September 2015 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Abstract In 2009, part of a ‘slave shackle’ was recovered from archaeological investigations at Trianon, an indentured labourer site on Mauritius dated from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This paper presents the results of a metallurgical assessment of the artefact, thought to represent colonial ironwork, a category that has hitherto remained understudied. The results are incorporated into the wider archaeological and historical evidence from Trianon, highlighting the value of studying colonial ironwork in context. Keywords Colonial . Shackle . Iron . Indentured labour . Slavery
Introduction During fieldwork surveys in 2009 at Trianon, a small Dshaped ferrous artefact was recovered, sparking considerable interest amongst the field archaeologists (Seetah 2010a). The find was identified as part of a shackle, a type used in * Thomas Birch [email protected] 1
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Main Quad, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
2
Instittut für Archäologische Wissenschaften, Abt. II, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
3
Dipartimento di Scienze Amientali, Informatica e Statistica (DAIS), Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dorsoduro 3246, 30123 Venezia, Italy
4
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Scientific Research Centre, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Mauritius during the period of slavery, a relic of the island’s turbulent past and its association with forced and free labour migrations. For the Indian Ocean in general, and this region specifically, we still have large gaps in our knowledge about the material culture of slaves and indentured labourers; ‘modern-world’ archaeology (Orser 2014) of this region lags far behind the Atlantic. Thus, this single artefact had the potential to provide much needed material evidence that could be informative at a number of levels. At the most basic, by studying its composition, the shackle would provide details as to the technological processes that were employed during its formation. If provenance could be established, there was the potential to reveal how certain aspects of trade, relating to metals specifically, were conducted between Europe and this colonial outpost and perhaps within the Indian Ocean world more generally. At a local level, the shackle could help enrich our understanding of daily life for slaves (or possibly labourers, see below) on the island by adding an important piece of evidence to an otherwise impoverished repository of finds. At the present time, artefacts detailing slave/freed slave lifeways, specifically, are restricted to surface finds from Makak (ColwellChanthaphonh et al. 2014), materials recovered from the ‘Old Cemetery’ (Appleby
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