The underlying goal of this research is to understand how changing global scale economic patterns affect social organization, especially in small scale developing societies. In situations where there is close proximity between "managers" and "workers" what are the interpersonal rearrangements which occur?. Archaeological research such as that described below has the potential to trace out such interactions over extended periods of time.
This National Science Foundation award Douglas V. Armstrong (Syracuse University) to examine a revolutionary change in agricultural and labor systems in Barbados. This research is being organized as a cooperative international effort between archaeologists at Syracuse University and the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. The study will focus on the scientific investigation of cultural deposits at the newly rediscovered pioneer English settlement at Trents Plantation, a founding settlement originally known as Charles Fort. The site, rediscovered through GIS (geographic information system) analysis of a plantation map dating to 1646, provides a unique opportunity to examine early life on a small-scale farm. The excellent preservation of stratified deposits, spanning more than 350 years and including the only undisturbed (unplowed) enslaved labor settlement in Barbados, allow the scientific examination of the shift from small-scale farm to large-scale production of sugar, the transition to a sugar economy, the institution of slavery, and the rise of capitalism in the British West Indies.
Trents was one of the first estates settled in Barbados in 1627. It began as a small-scale operation engaged in mixed agriculture (cotton, tobacco, indigo) by farmers using indentured and enslaved laborers. It was part of a rapid and dramatic shift to agricultural/industrial production of sugar using large numbers of enslaved African laborers beginning in the 1640s. The significance of Barbados to the rise of the plantation system in the Americas has been well chronicled by historians, but prior to this study no traces of pre-sugar era estates had been known and no intact and unplowed enslaved laborer settlements had been identified for Barbados.
The study will use a rigorous set of archaeological methodologies to collect and analyze artifacts, dietary remains, and spatial relationships. The study will test a series of hypotheses examining changes in social systems in the colony. It will: 1) explore and evaluate sites associated with the founding of an English colony in the Caribbean (1627-1640s); 2) analyze the record of social relations reflected in the shift from small scale farms that used indentured (European) and enslaved (African) labor to large scale capitalistic agro-industrial plantations that relied primarily on enslaved laborers from Africa (transitional era: 1640s-1680s; and early sugar era: 1680s-1720s; and later period of slavery 1720s-1834); 3) critically examine the landscape in which slavery emerged as the dominant form of labor; and, 4) assess changes in the local environment as lands were cleared for agricultural production.
The changes that took place in Bardados had profoundly impacted the social and economic structure associated with enslavement of Africans and the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade. The plantation systems developed in Barbados were used as models in the British settlement of Jamaica and South Carolina, and established complex trading networks that linked merchant traders in Boston and England and provision farmers throughout New England. The changes set in motion in Barbados with the rise of the capitalstic sugar plantation and the shift to chattel slavery were profound and world changing.
