2007 Archaeology of the Creole Cultures of the French West Indies

For over 20 years, historical archaeologists have investigated the sites of Caribbean plantation villages to seek insights into the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted to and survived the horrors of slavery, and created unique and vibrant Creole cultures. These studies have been conducted in virtually every part of the Caribbean, although principally on the Anglophone islands. This paper reports on preliminary and ongoing research being conducted on two sugar plantation village sites, Grande Pointe and La Mahaudiére, on the French island of Guadeloupe.

2007

Les enquêtes de l’archéologie historique “d’un peuple sans histoire” dans les Antilles françaises ont pris plus de temps à se développer que dans d’autres parties des Caraïbes. Récemment, cela a Guadeloupe donne des aperçus dans l’organisation des villages d’esclaves, la culture à laquelle se consacraient les résidents de ces villages, et quelques unes des stratégies d’adaptation et d’exploitation e t n e s é r p n o i t a c i n u m m o c e t t e C . n o i t a t i b a h ’ l e d e l o é r c e d n o m e l s n a d e é p p o l e v é d e l a t n e m e n n o r i v n e l’archéologie d’ habitation dans les Antilles françaises, et présente des résultats du travail fait sur

Archaeological research has made significant contributions to the study of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, but until recently researchers neglected the French islands. This paper reports on archaeological fieldwork at Habitation La Mahaudière in Guadeloupe, focusing on the economic and social lives of plantation laborers and exploring articulations between local realities at this sugar plantation and broader historical process of the Caribbean region and the French colonial world.

2020

Cette communication nous presente une etude sur l'archeologie, les plantations et l'esclavage aux Antilles francaises. Les recherches archeologiques sur l'esclavage et les habitations dans les Caraibes existent depuis les annees 1960/1970. A l'inverse, les Antilles francaises ne s'interrogent que depuis peu sur le sujet avec la creation en 2011, d'un programme archeologique de longue duree sur l'experience de l'esclavage en Martinique et en Guadeloupe. Pourquoi realiser des fouilles archeologiques aux Antilles francaises ? Y-a-t-il des similitudes ou des differences dans les resultats archeologiques entre les iles anglaises et francaises ?

2011

I dedicate this work in memory of my mother, who first taught me about the love and power of food and to remember who you are. v Acknowledgements It took more than a village to help me complete this dissertation and it's only fitting that I recognize and express gratitude to these amazing people. I must first thank Drs.

Scholars of Caribbean slavery have long been interested in the informal economic activity in which the enslaved engaged, localized in provision grounds, housegardens, and Sunday markets. These pursuits, independent from plantation-based monocrop agriculture, provided for the subsistence needs of the enslaved and compensated for a lack of provisioning by planters. Such economic activity by the enslaved is commonly linked to the development of strong social and economic networks which facilitated post-emancipation transitions to subsistence agriculture or a peasant economy. Much of the research on these topics, however, has been focused on the former British colonies. This dissertation examines the social and economic lives of laborers on a French Caribbean plantation, Habitation La Mahaudière, in the northern Grande-Terre commune of Anse-Bertrand in Guadeloupe. Using archival and archaeological evidence, I examine the long-term history of the laborer’s village, spanning the mid-eighteenth through the early-twentieth centuries. I use information collected through excavations of five household structures to establish diachronic comparisons of the domestic economies of village inhabitants. I analyze the negotiation of social relations of power in everyday practice through a close consideration of architectural remains, artifact assemblages, and the documentary evidence from an 1840s court case against estate owner, Jean-Baptiste Douillard-Mahaudière. This evidence suggests the importance of the local context and the particularities of the French colonial setting to an understanding of the practice of slavery in the colonies. I demonstrate the impact of turbulent historical circumstances on the day-to-day lives of laborers, and examine the entanglement of material culture in these processes.

2009

De Waal, M.S., 2009, Small islands, large settlements: Archaeology at Les Îles de la Petite Terre, Guadeloupe, F.W.I. In: Caribbean Quarterly, Caribbean Archaeology and Material Culture, Vol. 55, No. 2, June 2009: 5-22. Between 1998 and 2000, three archaeological fieldwork campaigns were carried out at Petite Terre, F.W.I., by teams of archaeologists from Leiden, the Netherlands. Petite Terre consists of two small, uninhabited, calcareous islands. The fieldwork consisted of intensive and systematic field walking, covering parallel transects, separated by 10 m intervals (Terre de Haut) and 20 m intervals (Terre de Bas). At some sites, 1 square m test units were excavated as well. The surveys resulted in a site inventory that contains seven sites: two indistinct sites and five large settlements, all dated to the Late Ceramic A period (AD 600/850-1200/1300). The investigations have demonstrated that Petite Terre was permanently inhabited and that its inhabitants participated in micro-regional and regional contact networks.

2021

Comprising 20 scientific contributions to the archaeology of Guadeloupe, French West Indies, this volume places the latter Caribbean island in the spotlight by presenting the results of four contemporaneous archaeological sites. By means of these four sites, this book explores a variety of issues contemplating the transition from the Early to the Late Ceramic Age in the Lesser Antilles. Studies of pre-Columbian material culture (ceramics, lithics, faunal, shell, and human bone remains) are combined with additional microanalyses (starch and phytolith analyses, micromorphology and thin sections) to sort out the processes that triggered the cultural transition just before the end of the first millennium ce. The multidisciplinary approach to address these Saladoid sites shows the current state of affairs on project-led archaeology in the French West Indies and should be of great value to both researchers and students of Caribbean archaeology, material cultures, zooarchaeology, environmental studies, historical ecology, and other related fields.