Where is the Caribbean? French Colonial Archaeology in the English Lake
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Where is the Caribbean? French Colonial Archaeology in the English Lake Kenneth G. Kelly
Published online: 3 September 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract Archaeological investigation of the Caribbean region has generally incorporated unquestioned assumptions about the nature and scale of the context. Most work has been done in the Anglophone Caribbean, and has implicitly taken the English colonial world as the normative context for comparative analysis. This view leaves out a significant portion of the Caribbean colonial world—that of the French imperial program. The French colonial venture in the Caribbean has, until recently, been overlooked by historical archaeology. Recent survey and excavation of sugar, indigo and coffee plantation sites, as well as urban archaeological work, has begun to shed light upon the nature of French colonial life as distinct from that in the Anglophone Caribbean, and also on the ways that the experiences on specific French islands were different from each other. The individual histories of Martinique and Guadeloupe are contrasted in this paper, with reference to the nature of the archaeological record that has been explored, and that remains to be investigated. Keywords Plantation archaeology . Caribbean historical archaeology . French West Indies . Guadeloupe . Martinique
Introduction This article approaches the issues of scale and of local versus regional investigation that are outlined in the introduction (Hauser, this volume) in a rather different way that takes into account the specific nature of the French Antilles. Many of the studies of historical archaeology in the West Indies have been constructed in such a way that the region is considered to be the larger Caribbean, and the local is viewed as the specific island upon which the researcher is working. Often explicit in this approach
K. G. Kelly (*) Department of Anthropology, Hamilton College, University of South Carolina, Room 317, Columbia, SC 29208, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Int J Histor Archaeol (2009) 13:80–93
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is the idea that the Caribbean region is the non-local, characterized by the broad strokes of the longue durée, and implicit in this is the notion that the region against which the local is contrasted is somehow British. Of course, there are exceptions to this rather broad characterization, such as the research that has been conducted in the formerly Danish Virgin Islands (Anderson et al. 2003; Armstrong 2001; Chapman 1991; Lenik, this volume), and on the various small Dutch islands of the Caribbean (Barka 1996; Delle 1994; Gilmore 2004; Haviser 2001). But again, those research programs have often implicitly set themselves up as exceptions that prove the rule. We must remember that although the Caribbean was a Spanish Lake in the sixteenth century, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century it most certainly was not a British Lake (Fig. 1). This contribution presents a different world, the world of the French Caribbean. In the terms of the goals of this volume of the Internat
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