Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean ed. by James A. Delle and Elizabeth C. Clay (review)

James Delle and Elizabeth Clay's recent volume, Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean, is a critical contribution to the small but growing literature on the historic built environment of the African diaspora in the Caribbean. Hurricanes, earthquakes, intense island occupation, and impermanent materials often destroyed the built environments of enslaved Africans. Despite these challenges, the built environment of enslavement in the Western Hemisphere has been a significant focus of vernacular architecture studies and historical archaeology since its inception. In the Caribbean, recent efforts by architectural historians have deepened our understanding of the geographic scope and interpretive frameworks of these early modern slave-based societies. Historical archaeologists Delle and Clay provide additional perspectives on the material culture of enslavement in the region, a subject of recent scholarship. Despite its importance, our understanding of the built environment of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean is underdeveloped, owing mainly to the Caribbean's backwater status within the academy. This volume succeeds in introducing readers to the breadth of Afro-Caribbean experiences before and after Emancipation by bringing together a host of archaeological scholars working on different islands and different colonial and postcolonial contexts.

These contributions are organized into three sets: the first focuses on the built environment of plantations, the second on the island of Jamaica, and the third on colonial projects falling on the periphery of sugar production, namely those in nondominant sugar societies, in urban settings, and on military installations. As Delle and Clay argue in their opening chapter, examining the quality of housing and spatial organizations of enslaved African communities allows for exploration of the relationship between social control and autonomy in the built environment (3). Throughout, two major interpretive priorities are evident. The first is understanding the long-term changes to the quality of housing, particularly in reference to building material and architectural technology. Many of the chapters focus on the changing quality of housing from early, light, earthfast structures to more substantial barracks-style buildings. The catalysts for these architectural transformations were many and ranged from the need to improve conditions for enslaved communities because of housing reforms, to the need to sustain Caribbean enslaved populations after the end of the transatlantic slave trade. These arguments are not solely centered around the archaeological signatures of standing structures but also encompass the material remains of yards and communal spaces as mediators for community activity.

Charting the settlement patterns of enslaved African communities is the second interpretive priority of the authors in an attempt to understand the spatial parameters of control in both plantation, urban, and military landscapes. Here the authors reject the well-worn dichotomy that organic settlement organization demonstrates enslaved communities' relative control over their lives, while organized buildings in rows or barracks showed higher levels of control by plantation owners and their agents. Kenneth G. Kelly, for example, argues that housing improvement at La Mahaudière was a negotiation, not a paternal improvement (71–73). His interpretation provides a nuanced understanding of how architecture materialized social relationships and power dynamics in the plantation landscape. Scholars often posit arguments of material negotiations, but here Kelly interprets, through the construction of a stone wall and associated landscape features, the physical outcome of these negotiations. Hayden Bassett's approach materially constructs the landscapes of field-workers, as well as plantation and urban domestic servants of John Tharp on the north coast of Jamaica. This interrogation of differentiated lifeways among enslaved African groups on a single plantation system provides a subtle and critical understanding of material life in nineteenth-century Jamaica. Bassett also situates his data in the wider context of slave housing in Jamaica during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Delle and Clay demonstrate the need for interdisciplinary dialogues that offer a departure point for dialogue among archaeologists, architectural historians, and vernacular architecture scholars to deepen our understanding of...