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.