In an important and thought-provoking paper published more than ten years ago, Thomas LoftfieldFootnote 2 drew our attention to the possibilities of utilising two categories of evidence to deduce the gradual ‘creolisation’ (or hybridisation) of Barbadian colonial material culture from the late seventeenth century onwards.Footnote 3 Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first categories of evidence analysed by Loftfield was the development of strong local tastes in ceramic production and consumption. Utilising British ceramic forms as archetypes, a diverse community of potters produced characteristic local red wares for both industrial (eg, sugar-making) and domestic purposes.Footnote 4 These forms, which originally derive from a transfer of British pottery-making expertise to apprentice African potters,Footnote 5 do not appear to reproduce or retain African cultural ceramic memes. As Loftfield convincingly argues, intensive economic exploitation and industrial expansion of ceramic production on a massive scale in Barbados makes for an environment where this process is not applicable.Footnote 6 In other words, there is little room here for individual cultural choice within more centralised ceramic production economies such as that found on Barbados.
The second category of evidence cited by Loftfield focused upon the emergence of an unusual type of local fortification design, one that is utterly divorced from normal British military practice of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Barbadian style of fortification developed, he argued, from a local mindset which was fundamentally distrustful of a standing army of professional soldiers (and the attendant perception of the constant possibility of the loss of hard-earned local political autonomy). The fort at Maycock's Bay, north-western Barbados (which we shall meet again later), is cited as an example of a local taste for fortification design: idiosyncratic yet ultimately probably militarily ineffectual.Footnote 7 In Loftfield's words, ‘the defensive system of Barbados can be seen as being truly vernacular’.Footnote 8 These two features of Barbadian material culture from the late seventeenth century onwards emphasise, perhaps contrary to usual expectations,Footnote 9 that a very distinctive localised social and cultural identity was emerging at all levels in a culturally diverse island environment from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Barbados has long been considered one of the most British of the Caribbean possessions, and this is emphasised extensively in historical scholarship on the island.Footnote 10 It is suggested here that the lack of archaeological evidence for this strong British cultural flavour may in fact challenge these long-held historical ideas. As Loftfield has posited, the picture may be far more nuanced than previously thought. Rather than holding a mirror to cultural trends and ideas in late Jacobean England, unconsciously, and for a range of reasons outlined in this paper, Barbadian society at all levels was beginning to develop its own creole identity.
This paper aims to develop Loftfield's ideas further by applying the idea of cultural creolisation within a townscape environment and in its landscape context over a period of 300 years or so and by using a wide range of material cultural evidence as a basis for the analysis. Speightstown (Fig 1), located in the north west of the island in St Peter Parish, has been the focus of the author's archaeological and historical investigations since 2010.Footnote 11 Using a multidisciplinary approach – embracing archaeological, maritime/underwater, buildings and graveyard survey, targeted excavation and oral history research – the focus of this community archaeology project is to build as detailed a picture of the archaeological evolution of an eastern Caribbean townscape as possible, and to frame strategies for heritage management and site conservation.Footnote 12 The paper starts with a consideration of the theoretical basis of the ‘creole’ concept as applied to historical archaeology in the Americas. The discussion then moves on to a detailed historical contextual study of the place of Speightstown within Barbados and the world. Finally, after analysing developments in the townscape, in mercantile, planter, low-status, public and military architecture, in churchyard memorials and in other elements of material culture, a more nuanced concept for thinking about the role of creole culture in the Caribbean is proposed that may have wider implications for archaeological and cultural studies within other historical periods.
Map of Barbados showing location of main sites mentioned in the text. Drawing: author
Defining an archaeology of creolisation
The term ‘creole’ is popularly associated with linguistic studies of formalised languages that have arisen within cosmopolitan environments from pidgin tonguesFootnote 13 or with hybrid cuisines, such as Cajun, originating within the former French and Spanish territories of the south-eastern United States.Footnote 14 These are very helpful labels towards assisting an understanding of the wider archaeological and cultural implications of the term. The label derives in its original usage from the Spanish proper noun Criollo, which was used to describe a person born in the Spanish New World colonies from the sixteenth century, as distinct from migrants from the motherland.Footnote 15 In cultural studies (including archaeology) much attention has been focused upon the creation of these new identities within a New World historical context from the sixteenth century onwards.
A number of scholars have drawn attention to the fact that the process of ‘becoming creole’ is in fact very nuanced and complex, if not, in the words of one, a ‘chaos-producing factor’.Footnote 16 The work of the Barbadian writer and academic Edward Kamau BraithwaiteFootnote 17 on the early period of British settlement in Jamaica (from the beginning of the eighteenth century) is pertinent here. He views the process of creolisation as starting through the ‘absentee cultural and material influence of the mother country’,Footnote 18 and then proceeding through two interrelated phases: a structured period of acculturation (active socialisation from the top down) and a concomitant period of unplanned, unstructured interculturation, which is less visible and less predictable, relying on chance rather than a pattern of socialisation.Footnote 19 Creole society ‘is the result of a complex situation where a colonial polity reacts as a whole to external metropolitan pressures and at the same time to mutual adjustments made necessary by the juxtaposition of master and slave, elite and labourer, in a culturally heterogeneous relationship’.Footnote 20
Historical archaeologists – and more particularly scholars studying the archaeology of the African Diaspora and colonialism in the New World – have enthusiastically embraced the creole cultural idea, but not without reservation.Footnote 21 Historically – and with reference to the archaeology of the African Diaspora – there has been a tension between scholars who see the wholesale survival of identifiable West African cultural traits in the newly industrialised societies of the Caribbean islands and the rest of the Americas and those grounded in creole theory who envisage a pattern of cultural mixing, a melange of African cultures coming together as hybrids.Footnote 22 Moving away from debates within the framework of the discipline of African Diaspora archaeology, the work of the American archaeologist James Deetz provides the foundations for the wider application of the creole model to cultural change in the colonial societies of the New World.Footnote 23 A number of recent case studies drawn from work on the hybridisation of cultures by American archaeologists in the Chesapeake region of Virginia,Footnote 24 Spanish colonial St Augustine in Florida,Footnote 25 French/US colonial Louisiana (a case study which has implications for the interpretations of the data presented here)Footnote 26 and, more generically, North American plantation lifeFootnote 27 have highlighted the rich archaeological potential for investigating the interrelationship of different peoples in the cultural melting pot of colonial North America from the seventeenth century onwards.
These approaches have also been archaeologically investigated in the island societies of the AtlanticFootnote 28 and the Caribbean,Footnote 29 which, owing to their geographical constraints as ‘bounded landscapes’ (or better still, ‘islandscapes’), offer, if anything, an even more intense ‘laboratory’ for cultural change and innovation.Footnote 30 Generalised archaeological trajectories of research in the British Caribbean, for example,Footnote 31 have tended to focus on the archaeology of the sugar plantation, an important socio-economic node within the islandscape, and one which combines the archaeology of the subaltern African slave population with the examination of expressions of power by the planter class, naturally the most visible segment of society in terms of economic, cultural and social impact.Footnote 32 In the case of the former, fruitful attempts have been made to study possible West African survivals and adaptations in the new mixing pot that is seen in the rapidly industrialising sugar islands from the 1700s onwards. Such tangible categories of evidence could include jewellery, clothing, food technology, burial culture and even ‘African’ cosmological symbols used as designs on clay pipes.Footnote 33 Intangible survivals could include foodways, music, oral traditions and belief systems.Footnote 34 In the case of the plantocracy, cultural historians have been most interested in how this dominant class sought to maintain an English identity in a tropical island environment.Footnote 35 Equally their interplay with other Europeans of the non-planter class – such as the Quakers and JewsFootnote 36 who form a further ‘layer’ of the creole society of Barbados (and indeed other British Caribbean island possessions), along with the poorer white indentured labourer class (discussed below) – is another important theme.
In Barbados, apart from the work of Loftfield and Handler referred to above, there appears to be less focus on the archaeological recognition of creole cultures in comparison to the other Caribbean islands. In fact, one might argue that true creole social, and by extension biological, mixing is fairly rare on Barbados. Recent genetic studies,Footnote 37 for example, have pointed to the relative lack of genetic hybridisation among African populations in Barbados, let alone intermixing with European populations, such as is seen for example in Jamaica (a much larger island). This factor may be explained by the comparative geographical isolation of Barbados, lying as it does windward and up-current of the other Caribbean islands. As a consequence there was less scope for inter-island movement, and this factor may have contributed to the rise of a very distinctive (and perhaps conservative) Barbadian creole culture, one born of relative isolation and social stability, rather than an environment of constant and disruptive socio-political flux.Footnote 38
Speightstown in Barbados: the historical and methodological background
Before examining the development of this creole culture as evidenced by a number of differing strands of archaeological evidence, it is important to understand the historical backdrop against which it took place. Although Barbados was apparently first sighted and named by Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century,Footnote 39 the first landing was made by the English, at the site of Holetown, on the west coast, in 1625. This was followed up by a concerted attempt at settlement in 1627. By the end of the seventeenth century, after a political struggle for control of the island, which mirrored wider concerns in England at that time,Footnote 40 the English settlers – who by now were established in some numbers alongside poor indentured white labourers, African slaves and imported Amerindians – abandoned attempts to cultivate tobacco and cotton, and turned to what would become a hugely lucrative commodity: sugar. It is beyond the scope of this paper to detail the development of this industry, which transformed the fortunes of the English (and subsequently British) Caribbean islands,Footnote 41 but from the point of view of Barbados and Speightstown, the importation of Sephardic Jewish expertise from northern Brazil to assist in the establishment of cane cultivation and sugar-processing on an industrial scale had important implications for widening the island's sociocultural profile. This factor clearly contributed to the development of a nascent Barbadian creole culture.
By the 1700s Barbados was rapidly becoming one of the wealthiest of England's colonies, and was one of the most densely populated. The main settlement, as today, was to be found on the south-western corner of the island, at Bridgetown (St Michael Parish). Other significant settlements included Oistins (Christchurch Parish), Holetown (St James Parish; formerly Jamestown, the site of the first landing) and Speightstown (St Peter Parish), the most northerly of the settlements and named after a certain William Speight, a wealthy merchant who served as a member of Governor Hawley's first parliament of 1639.Footnote 42 Historical resources regarding the development of Speightstown as a whole are few, and a comprehensive urban history of what was to become one of the most important towns in the English Americas remains to be written. A number of eyewitness accounts dating from the mid-seventeenth century give some idea of the size of the town, however, and refer to the disposition of the fortifications, which were designed to protect the bay from Dutch or French raiders.Footnote 43 At an early stage, with the presence of Quakers, Jews and planters as well as African slaves and indentured labourers, Speightstown was already taking on a cosmopolitan complexion. By the early eighteenth century, the importance of trade with south-western England had earned it the nickname ‘Little Bristol’, a name that is still used today in tourist literature.Footnote 44
In unpicking the make-up of this nascent creole townscape, one needs to view the roles of the different competing segments of society at work within it. At the apex we may recognise the plantocracy (predominantly rural), then – socially and economically beneath them – merchants, agents and Jews (all urban).Footnote 45 A sizeable Quaker population was also already established here on the fringes of the mercantile community and on the whole was more anti-slavery in outlook than the plantocracy. The Jewish population originated from Pernambuco, in Brazil, and, having arrived with the sugar industry, diversified into bullion dealing and other mercantile activities geared towards the needs of the nouveau riche planter and mercantile community.Footnote 46 In 1710, twenty Jewish families lived in Speightstown and were assessed separately for taxation purposes.Footnote 47 Their settlement appears to have focused upon a thoroughfare then called Jew Street, which might be identified with modern Chapel Street (see n 82 below). Their numbers rose to seventy in total until 1739, when their synagogue was attacked; numbers subsequently declined as they moved either to Bridgetown or on to other opportunities in the Americas.Footnote 48 Beneath this ‘upper-middle’ urban layer of society was the poor white indentured servant population, mainly Irish (and especially problematic to the authorities because they were Roman Catholic) but bolstered by political prisoners transported for their activities in the English Civil War and, latterly, the duke of Monmouth's 1685 rebellion.Footnote 49
At the very bottom of the social and economic system were the African slaves, brought in to service the rapidly industrialising sugar plantations. In 1655 the numbers of Europeans and Africans were respectively 23,000 and 20,000; in 1684 it was 19,568 and 46,502 (white migration to other British colonies and participation in military service largely accounts for this population fall),Footnote 50 so it is clear that, by the late seventeenth century, Barbados was predominantly an African island in terms of proportional population make-up. Over the period from 1650 until the banning by the British of the slave trade in 1807,Footnote 51 roughly 350,000 African slaves were transported to Barbados (over the same period, 375,000 were transported to British North America as a whole) but, significantly, by 1817 only 7 per cent of the 77,000 black slaves on Barbados were African-born.Footnote 52 Africans were therefore the most numerous in terms of population numbers, yet the increasing numbers of native-born slaves implies a possible distancing over time from a range of African cultural traditions. Even within what seemed to be a socially and culturally monolithic group, subtle social differentiations could be made. The acquisition of useful skill sets allowed certain slaves to rise higher in the social pyramid as prized shipwrights, carpenters or even gunsmiths, trades that gave them a small degree of economic freedom.Footnote 53
The urban and built landscape
Having briefly outlined the emergence of a mixed population group in Barbados generally – and in Speightstown specifically – from the mid-seventeenth century, we now turn to the diverse categories of archaeological evidence that reflect this cultural interplay and the emergence of this Barbadian creole culture.
Any visitor to modern Speightstown will be struck by the relatively unspoilt and historic character of the town; in fact, only four houses survived the hurricane that devastated the island in 1831. Much was rebuilt in situ,Footnote 54 which is why Speightstown still arguably represents one of the most important historic townscapes in the Caribbean. The core of the modern and historic settlement extends some 500m along the coast and some 500m inland.Footnote 55 Comparison with an 1898 map of the town (the earliest plan we have managed to locate: Fig 2) shows that the town developed along the north–south coastal axis (Queen Street), the focus of mercantile settlement. Smaller side streets (Chapel Street; Church Street), running perpendicularly off this main route, are the focus of church and chapel construction as well as smaller houses and, latterly, schools. This is a practical urban plan, which takes into account the needs of the commercial and domestic sectors respectively.Footnote 56
Comparison of the modern street plan of Speightstown (left) and a map from Fraser's Directory of Barbados (1898). Drawing: author
The standing historic buildings evidence a local architectural adaptation to the needs of the mercantile community. The three-storeyed houses along the main north–south street have covered verandas and spacious ground floors, combining shop/storage space below with living space above (Fig 3). From the nineteenth century onwards, jetties extended from the rear of some of these shop houses down to the beach (see Fig 13).Footnote 57 The building technology has an overwhelmingly local flavour: lime-coral mortar and coral were widely used for walling (in many cases this is now degrading as a result of neglect: Fig 4)Footnote 58 and local tropical hardwoods for door and window frames. The recently restored eighteenth-century Arlington House at Speightstown (now a museum) also incorporates imported bricks, which arrived in the form of ships’ ballast (Fig 5).Footnote 59
Mercantile shop house on Main Street, Speightstown. Photograph: author
Decay reveals the coral substructure of this Speightstown building (scale bar 10cm). Photograph: author
Imported brickwork used in the coral fabric of Arlington House. Photograph: author
Arlington House and the other mercantile structures of historic Speightstown are all indicative of a continuum of strong localised creolising trends in architectural development. The earliest forms of building in Barbados are described in the mid-seventeenth century as being long, low single-storey houses of timber with low roofs, open at the west end.Footnote 60 With the influx of craftsmen from the English West Country as indentured labourers after the English Civil War and the Monmouth Rebellions, more contemporary trends from the mother country were copied and adapted. House design thus combined an idealised social memory of home (described as ‘gothic and renaissance forms’) with local pragmatic needs, which suited local climatic conditions and used local readily available materials.Footnote 61 Although bricks were an imported elite form of material culture, local artisans, both European and African, very soon mastered the fabrication of brick, tile and architectural ceramics, and these were lavishly used. A will of the Quaker Widow Settle, dated 11 January 1678, for example, records a ‘round stone pigeon house tyled … seven negro houses of stone and tyled … one large pott-house to make dry earthen-wares in’ (and it must be assumed that planter and mercantile houses were even more richly appointed than their Quaker equivalents).Footnote 62 Additionally, the use of sash windows, rather than hinged casement windows, is a strong local tradition from the outset, being more practical for the climate; the considerable size of such windows allows for better ventilation whilst adding to the local vernacular architectural style.Footnote 63 In time, this Barbadian form of urban mercantile architecture would be transplanted to Charleston in South Carolina – effectively almost a Barbadian colony – where we see it in the ubiquitous ‘single house’, a long, narrow form, one room wide, placed at right angles to the street to take advantage of the predominantly long, narrow building plots (Fig 6).Footnote 64
Arlington House, the eighteenth-century archetype of the ‘single house’ of Charleston, South Carolina. Photograph: author
Also present on the edges of the historic townscape core is the ubiquitous Barbadian ‘chattel house’, a form of architecture developed within the post-emancipation context of Barbadian history, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (Fig 7). As the name suggests, this form of house is easily dismantled, moved and rebuilt, and it evolved in response to a specific set of legal circumstances in the post-emancipation period when freed slaves found it difficult to acquire land and were at constant risk of eviction from capricious landlords. The chattel house belongs to a much wider vernacular creole tradition of African freed slave cabins/houses across the New World as a whole,Footnote 65 and may preserve fundamental elements of African cultural tradition. These include the gabled roofFootnote 66 and the attached yard, or garden zone, which has strong symbolic resonance among African-American/Afro-Caribbean populations, representing important liminal zones between the domestic unit and the natural world.Footnote 67 Many of the smaller peri-urban houses of Speightstown, and all the chattel houses, have small plots and great attention is attached to their care and maintenance even today.
This ‘chattel house’ on the eastern boundary of the historic core of Speightstown, Chapel Street, bears a Barbados National Trust plaque drawing attention to its significance for the island's heritage. Photograph: author
The uniformity of chattel house size (based upon the repetition of the gabled unit) is also informed by the lengths of standardised imported timber forms, as well as the need for portability. Individual choice comes into play solely with the painting scheme or size of the overall house. Whilst undoubtedly African architectural memes are emphasised in the chattel house, so too are European eighteenth-century tastes. The reproduction, or mimesis, of the jalousie, or window shutter, is important in this regard. It is almost as though a conscious decision to copy plantation architecture, with its extensive reproduction of window shutters, so vital in a tropical climate, is an overriding factor in the formation of a new Afro-Caribbean post-emancipation cultural identity. At all levels domestic architecture in Speightstown reflects an emergent localised tradition, combining practical need with shifting concepts of status.
Creole Christians?
This process of creolisation is also represented in monumental and ideological architecture, and indeed in religious behaviour as a whole, over the period 1650–1900. The parish church of St Peter at Speightstown was rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1981, replacing a building that had been erected after the hurricane of 1831. Although largely modern, the building utilised earlier features and is a fine example of a characteristic Barbadian creole approach to the design of a church. Here the construction is of coral and render. The large windows, quite out of scale with the rest of the building, provide for ventilation. Quasi-Grecian pediments frame the north and south doors (Fig 8). It is an odd and diverse mix, and the squat bell tower appears to be the sole concession to English parochial church style – though even this has a white surface render and wooden jalousies as window louvres in the bell loft.
St Peter's church, Speightstown: the south door. Photograph: author
Class was a key element in defining where one sat in the church, and so the internal plan reflects Speightstown's social mix. Parish records indicate that the wealthy merchants (and few planters) sat at the front and the few baptised slaves sat in the galleries above. It was also customary to rent out pews to individuals who felt that their social status demanded better.Footnote 68
Subtly, Christian behaviour began to reflect the emergent creolisation of Speightstown and Barbados rather than acting as a faithful copy of Anglican life back home in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 69 This is reflected in the organisation of Christian space and time and the centrality of festivals and sacramental behaviour. Initially, for example, Christian slaves could be married in church, but latterly the practice of marrying at ‘Parson's house’ became widespread and then at ‘back of church’ until, in time, they were fully incorporated into the church in the post-emancipation context.Footnote 70 Among the planter and mercantile community, baptisms became key festivals, fixing the lineage of the family within time and space, becoming events of great feasting and drunkenness.Footnote 71 A trend towards an emphasis on Eucharistic behaviour in the nineteenth century in Barbados saw the enrichment of chancel and altar areas in churches in what has been described ‘normalised European gentry aesthetic’,Footnote 72 yet the practice of elite burial close to the altar certainly recalled pre-Reformation, Catholic ideas.Footnote 73
Memorials and funerary material culture also present an important category of evidence for creolisation. At Speightstown, the initial focus of community burial was on the churchyard itself and, although this has been extensively altered over time, much evidence remains to deduce subtle shifts in commemorative practice. The first thing to emphasise is just how important the act of commemorating lineage was, and this may be a factor of life in the tropics as a whole: ‘high rates of mortality stressed reconnection with ancestors, be they in Senegambia or Shropshire’.Footnote 74 Elite members of the St Peter's community, mostly of mercantile stock according to parish records, had access to the proximity of the church itself, especially round the eastern end of the churchyard. During building recording of the church in 2010, bricked-up and long-abandoned burial vaults were recorded under the east end of the church and these are original features that survived the 1831 hurricane (Fig 9). In addition, at least three barrel-roofed vaults, of characteristic Barbadian form, are located close to the east end of the church (Fig 10), their inscriptions mostly long illegible and their fabric fast eroding.Footnote 75 These vaults are also present at a number of other older island churchyards (such as St James, Holetown, St Michael's Cathedral, Bridgetown, and Christchurch, Oistins) and represent a distinctive form of localised funerary culture. Almost house-like, these tombs are ornate and are, above all, communal: they are family vaults for family lineages, planting the planter in the island landscape.Footnote 76 Nonconformists (mainly Quakers and Methodists) were buried at the Nonconformist cemetery to the south of Speightstown, although an extensive graveyard survey here has found no graves identifiably earlier than 1850, dating from the earliest phases of the Anglican use of this burial ground as an overflow cemetery; on this basis we must assume that archaeological evidence for Nonconformist burial has not survived the change of ownership.
St Peter's churchyard, Speightstown: early burial vaults. Photograph: author
St Peter's churchyard, Speightstown: plan and elevation of grave number PE 10. Drawing: Eve Cotterell
African slave burials would have been located within plantation villages at first,Footnote 77 and some of these reflect the survival of African belief systems, as evidenced by an unusual burial at Newton's Plantation, Christchurch.Footnote 78 Christianised slaves were probably buried within the limits of the Nonconformist cemetery, but we have no surviving evidence of their graves. In post-emancipation contexts, Afro-Caribbeans, now occupying positions of high community status, sought burial in churchyards. In general terms, graveyard memorials of early settlers have been removedFootnote 79 and often replaced with what we have termed a ‘ledger’ form of communal grave, which echoes planter practice of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 80 The ledger form is a flatter slab, with less of a built-up superstructure, and one that appears to be very popular from the 1930s onwards. It is surely significant that the trend to communal family burial remains important, but our survey work on the cemeteries of the northern half of the island clearly indicates that, in more recent times, individual burial, or burials in twos and threes, seems to be the norm.
Of the eighteenth-century Jewish population of Speightstown, very little archaeological evidence remains. Historical sources tell us that the Jews lived next to the synagogue in Jew Street;Footnote 81 this street remains unidentifiable, though we may assume that it is one of the older streets that run west–east off the main road.Footnote 82 Nor has our survey in the Nonconformist graveyard identified any Jewish burials. It may be that Speightstown Jews were brought to one of the five burial grounds for Jews in Bridgetown,Footnote 83 including one smaller graveyard reserved for non-Sephardic (ie, Ashkenazi) Jews and possibly for suicides. Certainly some of the names on the Bridgetown graves match those of known Speightstown Jewish families.
Moving from Speightstown to the hinterland, two other ecclesiastical sites demand consideration. Just past Mile-and-a-Quarter, about 5km due east of Speightstown, is the chapel of ease of All Saints. The present structure dates from the late Victorian period, but this small church served as the parochial church for the parish of St Peter when the Speightstown church burnt down in the seventeenth century. Consideration was then given to dividing the parish of St Peter to form a new parish at All Saints, serving the inland planter communities (who tended to maintain a social and physical distance from the mercantile community at Speightstown).Footnote 84 Preliminary analysis of the wall memorials and graveyard memorials here certainly indicates a more simplistic approach to commemoration, less grandiose and with fewer vaults, as would be expected of a relatively rural church serving a perhaps more conservative farming community (who tended to be buried on their own plantations). This suggests a different approach to the culture of death and commemoration between the inland plantocracy and the mercantile community of the town.
Not far to the west of this church, along the road down to Speightstown and marked by a concrete flight of steps, is a cave church, or, more accurately, an enlarged cave, now overgrown but clearly ecclesiastical in character. A large archway, complete with a cherub carved at the apex, forms the entrance from the north (Fig 11). At right angles, another enlarged room, with small niches carved into the wall (presumably for liturgical artefacts), completes what resembles a small oratory carved from a natural rock fissure. The use of caves in recent times to harbour illicit drinkers, runaway slaves and other outcasts from society is well attested in Barbados (and this cave is still used as a shelter by itinerants).Footnote 85 Perhaps the cave was used by a religious community that feared for its existence; the iconography of the ‘chancel arch’ and the hidden nature of the site suggests usage by Roman Catholic recusants after the period of the Treaty of Oistins when they were forced to worship in secret.Footnote 86
A possible recusants’ cave church at Mile-and-a-Quarter: the ‘chancel’ arch with carved cherubim. Photograph: author
This consideration of the archaeology of religious behaviour within Speightstown and its immediate hinterland highlights the diversity of practice from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century (and arguably even later), which mirrors more widely the formation of a creolised urban society.
The economic landscape
Diversity in religious behaviour is also reflected in the widening of economic behaviour over the period 1650–1900. At the centre of the economic system was the plantation, a unit geared to the production of sugar and the creation of vast wealth. The plantation great house was at the centre of this system, essentially an attempt at re-creating the stately home of England, albeit with adaptations to the tropical climate. If we take St Nicholas Abbey (one of only three Jacobean mansions in the Americas) as a case study,Footnote 87 we see the reproduction of a Dutch-style gabled house surrounded by a carefully landscaped and ordered garden (Fig 12). The industrial sugar-making area is safely hidden from view by careful planting and landscaping. Internally redundant fireplaces provide a symbolic – though hardly functional – focus to the main public rooms. This house and garden was clearly built as a projection of social and economic power in the traditional European manner,Footnote 88 yet an examination of the material culture associated with the inhabitants of houses such as this indicates the emergence of strong local tastes.
St Nicholas Abbey, St Peter, one of the oldest of the great houses in the Americas, dating from the late seventeenth century. Photograph: author
Major hurricanes in 1780 and 1831 have clearly impacted on the preservation of the material culture associated with these plantation houses, but wills, inventories and shipping manifests can be used to reconstruct the kinds of goods that were imported and constructed locally for the consumption of this new creolised plantocracy upper class. The use of larger windows in Barbadian architecture from the beginning of the eighteenth century – and with it the subsequent decrease in available wall space – meant less emphasis on the hangings, tapestries and paintings that would be found in similar circles in the mother country.Footnote 89 An original Barbadian style of furniture developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a fusion of styles. This crossover style was based upon the expertise of carpenters drawn mainly from the English West Country as indentured labour, and saw a reassessment of existing forms together with admixture from the American colonies. Distinctive cultural forms such as the Berbice chair (a type of lounger-style chair originating in Guyana) emerge at this time.Footnote 90
Extensive and detailed manifests of furniture in estate sales and in wills reveal local tastes in elite furniture. These include the use of hammocks and chests for storage and the continual mention of iron locks and keys, emphasising their rarity value and social cachet, since iron objects were imported and acquired a high commodity value. Other localised adaptations specifically mentioned in wills included saucers for placing under table legs to prevent cockroaches from climbing up and the use of calabash gourds (Crescentia cujete) and coconut cups derived from daily African slave use.Footnote 91 The wide choice of alcoholic drinks available was a further sign of status, and the use of ornate punchbowls reflected a formalised drinking culture,Footnote 92 suggestive of formalised and ritualistic communal drinking and, by extension, the use of alcohol as a means of building and cementing relations among the plantocracy.Footnote 93
Supporting the social and economic pyramid of the plantations were the African slaves who, in time, themselves became consumers in their own right. The archaeology of slave lifeways is ephemeral. Slave huts, constructed roughly of stone, mud or thatch, existed until fairly recently at Alleyndale, St Peter, and at a few locations in the north of St Peter Parish, but none were identified during our survey. The locations of slave villages are often only preserved in field names (such as ‘Negro Field’),Footnote 94 though the remains of sugar factories do survive. One of the most widespread and recognisable forms of industrial archaeology on Barbados is the plantation windmill, which again shows a strong local adaptation from the archetypal forms introduced by Dutch and East Anglian engineers.Footnote 95 The restored Morgan Lewis mill, in the parish of St Andrew (the only working sugar mill in the Caribbean), has sails adapted to tropical storms and technology adapted to heavy-duty cane crushing rather than grain milling or drainage work. Architecturally, windmill forms differ across the Caribbean islands, reflecting different cultural backgrounds.
In contrast to the relatively well-studied plantation unit, the merchant community of Speightstown (who presumably had access to similar items of material culture as the plantocracy) and their Jewish and Nonconformist neighbours are relatively poorly known, even through historical texts. One of the key aims of the present project is to use archaeology to try to reconstruct the picture of urban mercantile life in Speightstown. Initial trial excavations on a site to the west end of St Peter's parish church have uncovered the foundations of a Georgian building that once (prior to the reclamation of land to the west on the shore) stood directly on the littoral. This is undoubtedly a large merchant's house, built in the manner of those standing today, and yielding significant amounts of imported porcelain, wine bottles and clay pipe fragments (as well as unidentifiable metal implements). Underwater survey has focused upon locating the individual jetties attached to these mercantile houses, which are mentioned in historical sources.Footnote 96 Each jetty belonged to an individual merchant and serviced at least three schooners making runs to Bridgetown and back as well as to neighbouring islands. These schooners are also arguably examples of a creolised material culture in maritime form. Interviews with local shipwrights have clarified that the craft were built by eye, using readily available wood from thickets behind the beach, but were remarkably standardised in form. Measuring over 10m in length, with a single mast and bowsprit and crew of four or five, they were able to carry up to thirty-eight barrels (puncheons) of molasses as well as 200 large bags of sugar and were the mainstay of the Speightstown mercantile community until the 1940s, when road transport began to take over.Footnote 97
Another component of this more diverse and more widely accessible urban economy (in contrast with the very rigid and ordered plantation system) was the whaling industry, which was based at Speightstown from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s. Exploitation of the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) for meat and oil was an important seasonal activity; Yankee whalers used Bridgetown extensively between 1763 and 1919, but shore-based facilities were constructed at Speightstown in 1867 (with a single processing area at Holetown).Footnote 98 The industry was active during the whales’ migration period in spring, from January to May. Special boats, similar in appearance to the island's schooners, were suspended from davits on each jetty (Fig 13),Footnote 99 ready to be propelled under sail and oar with a crew of six or seven whalers to attack and slaughter the whales, when sighted, with hand lances. The carcasses were dragged ashore alongside the jetty for processing. Once whaling ceased at Speightstown, these boats were taken to Grenada, and then worked from a Norwegian whaling station on Glover Island (south of Grenada).
Speightstown seafront looking east c 1940, showing two whaling jetties. Photograph: Karl Watson
This current underwater archaeological study of the Speightstown whaling industry is unique within a Caribbean historical context,Footnote 100 and has identified the remains of one of the whaling jetties (likely to be Jordan's) and with it the remains of a large davit and rails (Fig 14), which appear to have been recycled from Barbados's single railway line, which once ran from Bridgetown to Belleplain in the east of the island.
The remains of a crane (from the lower of the two jetties in Fig 13) on the sea bed in 2012, at a depth of 7.0 metres. Photograph: Paul Wragg
Conclusion
Recent excavation at Maycock's Fort site by the authorFootnote 101 have tended to strengthen Loftfield's comments about the ‘creole nature’ of Barbados's shore fortifications and the contention that they are an unusual and local adaptation to defence. The material culture within the fort – predominantly military and dating in the later phases from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – points to idiosyncratic local practice. Finds include non-standard-calibre weaponry (sporting guns were often used) and a wide variety of local uniform types, evidenced by diverse finds of buckles, buttons and clasps. Architecturally, this fort sees a wide range of adaptations, additions, removals and reorientations; this is borne out by our survey of the remains of Denmark Fort and preliminary analysis of the visible remains of other shore forts along the coast. Even locally there is no real standard form of shore fort. This is localised creolisation at work (Fig 15).Footnote 102 Certainly, apart from the structured development of the redware pottery industry on the island, and, to some extent, the formalised education of slaves in Christian culture, all the other facets of creole culture described here would be recognised by Braithwaite as being evidence of interculturation rather than acculturation.
Comparative plans of Barbadian forts. Top: Maycock's Fort; middle: Denmark Fort; bottom: Fort Charles (after Loftfield 2001, fig 8.3). Only Fort Charles indicates professional military design. Drawing: author
In the light of Shannon-Lee Dawdy's analysis of the creolisation process in relation to a threefold colonial history of Louisiana,Footnote 103 the foregoing discussion may allow us to make the following observations about the creolisation of the Speightstown townscape specifically, and about Barbados as a whole. The ‘transplantation’ phase applied to this case study can be viewed in a relatively short-term period, roughly corresponding to the last half of the seventeenth century. This is evidenced by the emergence of ‘pioneer’ architecture and economic experimentation (based upon sugar, cotton and tobacco cultivation). Cultural innovations, such as the development of localised pottery forms, all emerged within a period of intense social upheaval during the Civil War period. This was of course a time of transportation of indentured labour from England and the massive, rapid growth of African slave imports. The construction of the recusants’ rock-cut cave church at Mile-and-a-Quarter bears witness to this period of upheaval and unrest.
The phase of ‘ethnic acculturation’ is recognised over a longer-term period, encompassing the whole of the eighteenth century, through to the eradication of slave trading in 1807 under the Slave Trade Act and then the complete banning of the institution of slavery under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. During this time, planter economies focused entirely on sugar cultivation and were now serviced by a growing and developing mercantile community, which was more diverse in character. Planters constructed larger and more extensive estates and developed a strong vernacular architectural and cultural tradition, stressing conspicuous consumption and ostentation. Even among slave communities (at least until the slave rebellion of 1816) social differentiation can be seen at this period, and divergent local approaches to fortifications and defence, as well as the widespread fabrication and use of local redware pottery, made on an industrial scale, are also indicative.
Finally, the ‘hybridisation phase’ can be seen to emerge after the emancipation of African slaves – and the sudden growth of a large class of new consumers – and with the loss of relative socio-economic power within the planter community as a result of the global collapse in sugar prices.Footnote 104 The archaeology of the post-emancipation period as a whole is hugely important and still poorly researched,Footnote 105 but elements such as the development of the chattel house (appropriating planter-style architectural motifs) and new freed slave villages featured strongly in this phase. The other important features of this period include new economic strategies away from the plantation (such as whaling), a reorientation of domestic cultural production, the construction of new places of worship (especially those of Nonconformists), the adaptation of pre-existing liturgical spaces and the mimesis of planter-style commemorative culture.
Beyond framing this basic model for cultural change (which, as has already been acknowledged, does not seek at this stage to recognise the role of agency in the process of creolisation) our research on relations between town and country, and on ideological and economic landscapes and seascapes, has the potential to make Speightstown one of the most intensively studied of historic Caribbean townscapes. Further research directions focusing upon cultural change and creolisation over this period suggest themselves, such as the study of the movement of pottery styles through the rest of the Windward Island chain, using stylistic analysis and petrology,Footnote 106 and of the formation of regional micro-traditions of low-fired earthenwares. Oral historical research continues to unveil other elements of non-tangible creole heritage, such as the development of local Tuk music from British military contexts, readapted in post-emancipation cultural frameworks.Footnote 107 Working alongside local stakeholders and tourism authorities, a more balanced strategy of heritage tourism for Barbados can begin to be developed on this basis,Footnote 108 one which gives equal voice to the subaltern elements of this richly diverse creole cultural tradition.Footnote 109
At the beginning of this paper it was suggested that traditional historical scholarship viewed Barbados in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a sociocultural ‘Little England’. Utilising a diverse archaeological methodology, allied to reference to local records and oral historical research, it can now be seen that this is not the case. Taking a creolisation model as a starting point, the potential for understanding the development of powerful local vernacular cultural identities in the Caribbean has been highlighted and provides an alternative approach to our understanding of the archaeology of identity and cultural formation in the post-medieval period. The challenge now is to see if similar conclusions can be made about cultural development in other Caribbean islandscapes.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost my thanks go to my Barbadian collaborators and friends, namely Kevin Farmer, Dr Sabrina Rampersad and Professor Karl Watson. Invaluable local help, advice and background information has also been provided by Clement Armstrong, Henderson Clarke, the Revd Peter Haynes, Luke Lascaris, David Michael, Adrian Roach and Mr and Mrs Kevin Warner. Many students and volunteers, past and present, from the University of Winchester, the University of Chester, the London School of Economics and the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, have contributed to the work of the team. All are worthy of mention, but in connection with the production of this paper, and in terms of day-to-day project organisation and leadership, the contributions of the following individuals should be highlighted: Charlotte Austin, Michael Bowey, Dan Carsten, Katherine Chivers, Eve Cotterell, Daniel Heale, Jim Heslop, Azumi Hosaka, Jennifer Hughes, Richard Hughes, Tessa Johnson, Jessica Noble, Muhammed Nur, Jade Poulton, Joel Sperry, Sabine Stevenson, Natasha Tudor, Sophie Wood, Paul Wragg and Malcolm Wright. Funding for the Speightstown Community Archaeology Project has been provided by the University of Winchester. The kind suggestions provided by two anonymous referees of this paper and by Professor Kevin Macdonald are gratefully acknowledged.
Manuscript sources
- London, British Library, Sloane ms 2302
Thomas Walduck's letters from Barbados, 1710
- London, British Library, Sloane ms 2441
‘An Account of His Majesty's Island of Barbados and the Government thereof’, 1684
- London, British Library, Sloane ms 3926
Henry Whistler's journal of the West Indies Expedition, 1654
- Bridgetown, Govt Dept Archives, Black Rock, Barbados Archives acc. no. 45
William Speight's will, 1643
