The Role of Caves and Gullies in Escape, Mobility, and the Creation of Community Networks among Enslaved Peoples of Barbados
The Role of Caves and Gullies in Escape, Mobility, and the Creation of Community Networks among Enslaved Peoples of Barbados
While the layout of plantation slave villages demonstrate a great deal of planter control, the private landscapes of enslaved peoples offer insights into the activities and experiences where the reach of the planter was more limited. Archaeological investigations of the caves and gullies surrounding St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation in St. Peter, Barbados offer insights into the activities that some enslaved plantation workers pursued. The gullies winding between St. Nicholas Abbey, the tenantry of Moore Hill, Pleasant Hall plantation and other estates in St. Peter contain a series of caves, many of which possess material culture, including ceramics, clay tobacco pipes, and black bottle glass. These caves, as liminal spaces on the landscape between adjoining plantations, appear to have served as meeting areas for enslaved peoples and later free workers. The privacy these spaces afforded spurred physical mobility and social interaction between enslaved peoples from surrounding villages, and may have fostered activities that were not permitted in the public sphere, such as gaming and leisure. Gullies are thus viewed as conduits and corridors that connected communities in the plantation-dominated landscape of Barbados and offered a temporary respite from the challenges of plantation life.
Keywords: material culture, plantation life, Barbados
Florida Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
