The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative

FAIN: PX-50011-08

Monticello (Charlottesville, VA 22902-0316)
Jillian E. Galle (Project Director: November 2007 to July 2009)

The development of an integrated digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of African slaves who labored on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative is an innovative collaborative project designed to further scholarship on slavery. An international team of scholars from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, the University of Southampton's Nevis Heritage Project, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool will digitize and deliver on the Web information from two eighteenth-century plantations and their slave villages, one located on Nevis and the other on St. Kitts. The result will be a first-of-its-kind digital collection of fully searchable archaeological and historical data from multiple slave village sites in the Caribbean. The teams will create a robust digital archive of archaeological and historical data through use of rigorous and well-defined cataloging standards and metadata, insuring interoperability and analytical comparability. DAACS archaeological analysts will catalog all of the archaeological materials to DAACS standards. Ceramicists from the University of Southampton and University of Tennessee will analyze and digitize all slave-made coarse earthenware ceramics. All recovered faunal remains will be digitized at Colonial Williamsburg's Zooarchaeological Laboratory. The rich documentary record of these plantations will be digitized in archives in the United Kingdom and on Nevis and St. Kitts. Both archaeological and documentary data will be freely accessible through two Web-based portals: the research-oriented DAACS Web site and the publicly-oriented International Slavery Museum Web site.

Associated Products

Afro-Caribbean ceramics and the economic dynamics of slave-village life on Nevis and St. Kitts (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Afro-Caribbean ceramics and the economic dynamics of slave-village life on Nevis and St. Kitts
Author: Fraser D. Neiman
Author: Barbara J. Heath
Author: Jillian E. Galle
Abstract: Ceramic assemblages from slave-village sites on islands in the eastern Caribbean are often dominated by locally-made ceramics, dubbed by archaeologists “Afro-Caribbean ware.” This paper offers an initial attempt to advance our understanding of these ceramics, based on samples from shovel-test-pit survey of three village sites on Nevis and St Kitts. We use INAA to assess the compositional distinctiveness of assemblages from different villages and address the question household production. We also track changes in the frequency of Afro-Caribbean wares, relative to imported ceramics, from the mid- eighteenth century to emancipation and their implications for changes in market participation. We highlight the critical role played by statistical methods in deciphering the larger historical meaning of these ceramics.
Date: 04/01/2011
Conference Name: Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

Market participation and adaptive advantage among in enslaved household s in the Caribbean and Chesapeake (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Market participation and adaptive advantage among in enslaved household s in the Caribbean and Chesapeake
Author: Jillian Galle
Author: Fraser Neiman
Author: Leslie Cooper
Abstract: Scholars have long recognized the crucial role of internal markets in the slave societies of the New World. This paper uses archaeological evidence from Jamaica, Nevis and the Chesapeake to assess local patterns of change and variation in the roles that markets played in enslaved peoples’ lives. Drawing on models of market dynamics, we suggest how enslaved market participants enjoyed important adaptive advantages over non-participants. We examine the abundance of locally manufactured ceramics, Chinese and European ceramics and other imported goods to measure change in market participation and uptake of costly consumer goods in each region.
Date: 04/01/2011
Conference Name: Annual Meeting for the Society for American Archaeology

Sugar, Slaves, and STPs : Preliminary Results from Nevis (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Sugar, Slaves, and STPs : Preliminary Results from Nevis
Author: Jillian Galle
Author: Fraser Neiman
Author: Leslie Cooper
Author: Derek Wheeler
Abstract: We describe preliminary results from STP surveys of the slave-village sites associated with two sugar plantations on the island of Nevis, in the eastern Caribbean. On both plantations we identified two villages, one dating to the 18th century and a successor settlement from the early-19th century. STP methods reveal for the first time the internal structure of these sites and allow us to date the occupations with accuracy. The results point to synchronous and similar settlement shifts on both plantations, linked to changes in sugar production strategies.
Date: 04/24/2009
Conference Name: 74th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative: The Artificial, Spatial and Historical Analysis of Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative: The Artificial, Spatial and Historical Analysis of Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Author: Fraser Neiman
Author: Jillian Galle
Author: Robert Philpott
Author: Roger Leech
Abstract: In 2008, an international team of archaeologists from National Museums Liverpool, The University of Southampton, and The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, based at Monticello in the United States, undertook an 18-month project to do just that: to provide scholars with access to archaeological and documentary data from five slave villages from three estates on the islands of Nevis and St. Kitts. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and The National Endowment for the Humanities, The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative was founded to address fundamental questions about slavery while also making its discoveries—both the synthesis and the raw data—freely available to scholars and the public via the Internet. This paper provides a brief overview of the Initiative, its outcomes, and preliminary results. The project itself is very much in progress, with plans for additional collaborative fieldwork and research.
Date: 06/29/2011
Conference Name: The Society for Caribbean Studies Conference,

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
Author: Jillian Galle
Author: Roger Leech
Author: Robert Philpott
Author: Fraser Neiman
Abstract: Multiple archaeological sites pages, detailed archaeological data, and access to transcribed primary sources from the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative were made available through The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery in June 2011. Complete archaeological data from five slave village sites and assocaited documents can be found at www.daacs.org. Links are below.
Date: 06/01/2011
Primary URL: http://www.daacs.org/resources/sites/region/Nevis/
Primary URL Description: The portal through which data for New River and Jessups Villages can be accessed.
Secondary URL: http://www.daacs.org/querydatabase/
Secondary URL Description: Link to DAACS Queries that enable a user to retrieve a myraid of data from the Nevis and St. Kitts villages excavated during The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative's field work.

Accounts, Plats and Artifacts: Comparative Analysis of Provisioning Schemes in the British Caribbean (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Accounts, Plats and Artifacts: Comparative Analysis of Provisioning Schemes in the British Caribbean
Author: Lynsey Bates
Author: Jillian Galle
Abstract: Over the past four decades, archaeological research has played a significant role in our understanding of the strategies developed by slave societies in to maximize profits through the exploitation of human labor. Much of this research has focused on the Caribbean, which consumed hundreds of thousands of more enslaved bodies than the American colonies. Our goal today is to build on this research to advance our understanding of the historical trajectories of slave societies on Jamaica and Nevis during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Date: 03/31/2012
Conference Name: The Archaeology of Slavery: Toward a Comparative Global Framework. Southern Illinois University

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