Preface
Int J Histor Archaeol
0 M. W. Hauser Department of Africana Studies, University of Notre Dame , Notre Dame, IN 46556 , USA
1 K. G. Kelly (
2 ) Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina , Columbia, SC 29208 , USA
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Mark W. Hauser and I organized and edited this volume as a special issue of the
International Journal of Historical Archaeology. The volume has grown from papers
presented at a session on Caribbean Historical Archaeology that we organized for
joint meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology and the Society for
PostMedieval Archaeology that took place in York, England in January 2005. Since then
we solicited papers and organized through a combination of editorial and peer
review these papers which introduce a number of new studies on Caribbean
Historical Archaeology. While the session was generally about Caribbean Historical
Archaeology, as we were listening to our colleagues in York, we realized that most
of the papers presented in the session kept coming back to the topic of scale.
In our work, Mark and I have regularly focused on how we can use
archaeological research to supply insights into the strategies used by members of
local communities to interact with local, regional, and global processes. As Mark
and I went through the papers, issues of abstraction, the variability of meaning, and
the importance of regionally grounded analysis kept emerging. This was in part a
result of similar interests among the various authors, but also due to the influence
scholars like Charles Orser, James Delle, Douglas Armstrong, Laurie Wilkie and
Paul Farnsworth have had on the field. As will be clear to the reader, while this
volume addresses plantation slavery in some contributions, it also recognizes the
complexity of local and regional histories by exploring urban archaeology,
landscape, and heritage management. In this way, the contributors recognize that
while the majority of publications on Caribbean historical archaeology have focused
on plantation life (approx 31%), there is a growing body of scholarship that has
looked beyond the estate grounds to urban (14%), cemetery (13%), and military sites
(11%), among others (Schied 2004).
This importance of regionally grounded analysis is also a result, however, of the
uneven topography past colonial societies left in the form of documents and
archaeologically visible remains. We did not edit this volume to highlight, or even
redress some of the major gaps in the archaeological record—that is being done by
these and other researchers elsewhere. Rather it is an attempt to explore how to think
critically about the effects scale exerts on our understanding of colonial regimes in
the Caribbean, in the place where Europe first experimented with modernity.
Schied D ( 2004 ) What's happening in the Caribbean: analysis of a bibliographic data set . Paper presented at the Conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology , St. Louis. (...truncated)