An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Social Landscape of a Jamaican Sugar Estate, 1754-1828

Abstract

Archaeological interpretations of domestic household organization have long recognized its role in the construction of social identities and in the furtherance of social goals. While much of the historical archaeology of Jamaica, and indeed the Caribbean more broadly, has focused on exploring spatial and consumption choices of enslaved Africans and African descendants, application of these kinds of analysis at the household level for planters is less widely applied. Yet, as archaeologies of whiteness are beginning to demonstrate, white identities are equally constructed within this same milieu and demand to be interrogated and deconstructed. We might expect this to be particularly true during the period historians have termed the “fall of the planter class” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when both the physical and political security of the planter class was under pressure. This project describes evidence recovered from Stewart Castle, a Jamaican sugar plantation great house occupied over the lifetimes of two generations of Stewarts between 1754-1828. By analyzing the spatial and consumptive patterns of planters such as Stewart, it seeks to map the deployment of material strategies and tactics used by this family in furtherance of social goals, namely the maintenance of white supremacy within a changing social order.