While much of life in the Caribbean has been well documented in archaeological literature, particularly in reference to sugar plantations, there is still much to be learned about life on these islands. This volume highlights sites, themes, and time periods that have often been overlooked by historical archaeologists, and looks particularly at how people maintained space within the oppressive structures of slavery and the relative freedom of post-slavery life in the Caribbean. Explicitly or implicitly highlighting space, the practiced or lived realm, as separate from place, the environment constructed by the dominant order (DeCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984), is key to the exploration of overlooked narratives found in this volume. These chapters bring to light not only places that have been previously left out of Caribbean archaeology but also utilize new techniques, such as examining soil quality (Bates) and exploring burial practices as landscapes (Blouet). Organized into two parts, the first part of this volume examines the colonial period in the Caribbean using new lenses and highlighting often ignored people and spaces. The second part explores the period after emancipation, showing various transitions that occurred throughout the Caribbean in terms of identities, landscapes, and material culture.

The first section of the volume highlights new approaches to the familiar topic of colonial sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the oppressive system of slavery that supported them, while also consciously looking at contexts beyond sugar. These include slavery on coffee plantations (Delle; Seiter), liminal spaces such as provisioning fields (Bates) and systems of caves and gullies (Smith and Bassett), and roles of poor whites in the Caribbean (Reilly; Ryzewski and Cherry). The chapters that explore slavery at coffee plantations on Jamaica (Delle) and St. Lucia (Seiter) make good use of the sometimes scarce documentary records and demonstrate the presence of nonwhite spaces in contexts beyond sugar plantations. Seiter and Ryzewski and Cherry both use survey approaches to studying plantation landscapes in the Caribbean, on St. Lucia and Montserrat, respectively, in order to highlight multiple contexts simultaneously. Ryzewski and Cherry also make an argument for the material signatures of different identity groups but intentionally leave the definition of “non-elite” open, suggesting instead that these groups may have included Euro-Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean, and/or Creole populations. Reilly also examines contexts that defy black-white dichotomies, looking at a community known through oral histories to have been the home of poor whites, and highlights the difficulties that arise from tendencies to assign certain artifact types to specific ethnic groups.

The second section of the book looks at identities reflected in landscapes and how they changed following emancipation in the Caribbean. By looking at spatial organization, many of these chapters did not focus as much on archaeological data as on places where there is great potential for archaeology to be illuminating. Blouet and Fellows examine identity creation and landscape transformation without any traditional artifact analyses. Chenoweth also emphasizes landscape and space over artifacts, presenting a good hypothesis for further testing of free black smallholder farms in the British Virgin Islands. Some chapters effectively combine the study of landscape with artifact analyses in order to explore identity changes on Dominica (Harris), Nevis (Meniketti), and the British Virgin Islands (Chenoweth) following emancipation. Lenik and Beier's chapter bridges both sections of the book, being both a post-emancipation context and a context beyond the sugar plantation, and makes a strong connection between artifacts and identity creation and hybridity in its exploration of the living spaces of colonial troops at Fort Rocky on Jamaica.

By including various islands in the same volume, this book reminds the reader of the importance of understanding the interconnectedness and movement between these seemingly isolated contexts. Wilkie touches on this in her conclusions while building on the themes of the book through anecdotes from her own work. She also reminds us of the importance of working with living communities, which is highlighted by the work of many of the authors in this book, but particularly by Reilly whose use of ethnographic data nicely complements the archaeological work at Below Cliff on Barbados. Finally, Wilkie stresses the importance of considering gender in identity construction, both before and after emancipation, which was generally lacking throughout this volume. Using the lenses of space and identity, this volume draws on examples from throughout the Caribbean, highlighting the importance of understanding the different backdrops for the system of transatlantic slavery and its dismantling, and the intersections of the spaces in between them.