The history and the present are all intermingled into one.
We know for a fact that laborers and enslaved people
preemancipation were living in these cabins,
but we also know they were used as guest
houses in more recent times, and then in
some cases they would use as trash dumps
in even more recent times.
So we get all of that trash and material
sort of mixed in together.
The beauty of it is that it allows us to
sort of look around and analyze the entire spectrum
of life on the estate.
In the 1800's, enslaved Africans were brought into the
ports of Christiansted on the Caribbean
island of St. Croix.
About a hundred forty enslaved people were forced to
work on Estate Little Princess, a sugar plantation
and Rum factory.
The project at the Estate Little princess really
began as a terrestrial archaeology component
to a Slave Wrecks Project, and the idea was that we
would have a terrestrial archaeology site,
and a maritime archaeology site
that could both speak to the slave trade from
different perspectives.
While the terrestrial archaeology has been
forthcoming, we haven't been so forthcoming in terms of
locating a shipwreck to tell that sort of
maritime perspective.
Overall it's been good because it's been providing new
information and new insight into ways that maritime
resources are actually used on terrestrial landscapes.
So aspects such as coral mining that was
used for housing construction, and then
also some of the shellfish and Whiting fish
of course that were used as provisions on the island.
Still trying to understand how this landscape
has changed over time is one of my main questions.
The island itself is borderline on its ability to
provide enough water for that many plantations.
Europeans who came here, along with others,
removed a lot of the surface vegetation so that they
could clear spaces to cultivate sugar.
When all those trees are removed, then the natural
soil deposition and also water regimes
are changed across the entire island.
Those kind of changes are visible on the landscape even
still, because even though there's not sugar widespread
cultivation on Island, it's changed the possible
plants that could actually live there.
It really allows us to think about how
enslaved Africans were using plant material, and that's
important because in the archaeological record a lot of
those don't don't appear, mainly because they go away.
But if we have access to the plants that are still
growing today, we can begin to think
about how these plants may have been
used by historic populations in the past.
Fewer people are talking about actually environmental
reparations, and what does it look like when we talk
about reparations in a context that has been
completely decimated by the slave trade.
and by slavery.
We're looking at increased soil erosion as a result of
these clear-cutting of forests.
We're looking at increased wave turbidity at the
destruction of these coral reefs ,
and that's something that doesn't just grow
back over a ten, 20 or even 50 years
In addition to surveying the environment,
researchers are speaking with the community, and using
historical records to better understand the occupation of
enslaved people on Estate Little Princess.
We don't have a 100% clear understanding of the full
range of occupation.
We know that the first parcel that became Estate Little
Princess was
purchased in 1749 and that it was only 11 or 13 acres.
Right now it's more than 30 acres.
So those maps show that up to 30 cabins existed
in the area where we're excavating.
Of course we've only found the remains of four.
By the 60s, there was a really sustained effort for
individuals to stop living in those cabins unless they
were working for the property owner.
From our perspective today it seems improbable
or illogical to stay in the place where slavery was
taking place, but for folks who were freed they didn't
have a whole lot of options.
There weren't guarantees that if they left St. Croix
they were gonna find a better life somewhere else.
Focusing in on the humanity of the
enslaved people is central to their research goals.
There's a way that people are obsessed,
that scholars have become obsessed with numbers.
And if we can pinpoint the exact amount of people
that came from this place this place or
this place, if we had the exact amount of glass of
ceramic of fauna, if we could compile these in these
databases, and it can give us this greater image of what
enslaved life was like.
But ultimately, if we're just talking about things
and we actually miss the human aspect of it,
it can be really dangerous.
So thinking about agency is this way of ensuring that
we're talking about humans, and that we're thinking
about various levels of agency, all under
the umbrella of enslavement.
So very complex questions and explorations,
but certainly worth diving into to really say out loud that
although these people were enslaved,
that they actually moved through this world,
and made choices under that regime
about how they lived their lives,
about how they built community with each other,
about how they loved themselves and others.
The artifacts on St. Croix help tell these
stories of agency and resilience.
We recovered a perforated shell here at the site,
and we've recovered a number of
smaller finds that could have been used
in adornment practices, like glass beads,
bone buttons, ceramic buttons, hook and eye fasteners.
So these small finds that speak to these larger dynamics
of dress at the site.
The fact that we're finding not just porcelain,
but hand-painted porcelain at Estate Little Princess,
tells something about access, and agency and the
movement of goods between communities
on this island.
So even though they're living inland,
they're nowhere near the town,
They're able to participate in the economy in a different
way than we might have thought of before.
They are not just there waiting for someone to
break something so they can get a hand-me-down,
they are actively procuring their own wares.
As a purification, they would have a limestone block,
and they'd perch that somewhere and the
limestone block has properties that is a
natural purifier, so they literally run water through the
stone, and then it would drip through the limestone into
a large storage vessel--the Afro-crucian ware.
So they're taking that same pottery,
but they're literally creating a system
to purify their own water, because they have been
blocked from access to cisterns that the Europeans
are mainly using, and they are relegated to using
these free guts, that are highly contaminated because
everyone's using it for water, for cleaning, for livestock,
for bathing, for any any purpose you can imagine.
They came up with a way to solve that themselves.
We're really interested in really understanding what
they went, through and what they survived,
what they see as their expression,
their identity, their culture, and their community
Beyond just looking at the artifacts,
beyond just looking at that
status of being enslaved.
We want to be able to tell the most complete story we
can, with the bits of pieces that we have to tell that.
you