Ethnicity, Race and the Archaeology of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Abstract
The
issue of ethnicity has been little considered by British post-medieval
archaeology. Archaeology has unique access to evidence of the role of material
culture in the expression and negotiation of historical identities. This paper
aims to provide a theoretical framework for the study of ethnicity in the
post-medieval period.
Many
archaeological discussions of ethnicity take a ‘situationist’ approach,
emphasising individuals’ choice from a range of available identities. Yet in
the study of the West Indian colonial societies of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, in which ethnic identity cannot be considered in
isolation from the extreme power relations of nascent racial slavery, the
application of a model of ‘individual choice’ is problematic.
In
this light, the role of Bristol City Museum in recent successful attempts to
present the multicultural heritage of Bristol’s historical involvement in the
Atlantic slave trade in is outlined. The potential for the new ‘inclusive’
agenda provided by this initiative to be applied to future archaeological
practice is discussed.
An
alternative theoretical framework for the archaeology of ethnicity in the later
historical period, based upon a contextual approach to material culture and
emphasising the global context of cultural interaction, is presented. Through a
unified, ‘macro-situationist’ theoretical approach to these issues, British
archaeology may begin the crucial process of addressing its previous neglect of
the histories of ethnic minorities.
Ethnicity,
Race and the Archaeology of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Ethnicity
and British later historical archaeology
Later
historical archaeology in Britain has traditionally involved illustration of
the details of industrial manufacture and, through traditional artefact
studies, regional distribution (Johnson, 1996: 187).
But recently attempts have been made to move beyond this descriptive paradigm,
a cross-section of which are presented in Sarah Tarlow and Susie West’s recent
edited volume The Familiar Past? (1999). A wide
range of contemporary archaeological theoretical approaches, previously applied
to pre-industrial contexts, is provided[1].
What unites these perspectives is an urge to shake off traditional
’post-medievalist’ attitudes, and to rise to the challenge of developing a
contextual and interpretative archaeology of the later historical period. Yet
behind the baffling array of modern social theorists whose ideas are mobilised
is tendency to retain a local agenda.
While
the discussions of individual lived experience and practice, consumer behaviour
or the appropriation and use of material culture are innovative and important,
the overwhelming feeling is of what has been termed elsewhere a ‘self-denigrating polyvocality’[2].
This does not mean, contra Orser (1996: 14), that we
should isolate ourselves from the achievements of prehistorians. Indeed, it is
argued below that the recent adoption by pre-industrial archaeologists of a ‘global’ interpretative context[3]
is of particular importance to later historical archaeology.
The
new atmosphere in British later historical archaeology has seen a continued neglect
of the issue of ethnicity - despite the presence of significant numbers of
Africans, Asians and other ethnic minorities in Britain throughout the past five hundred years[4]. Archaeology
has unique access to the material remains of the past landscapes and artefacts
through which ethnicities were expressed and negotiated - a potential which has
been investigated by American studies of the archaeology of slavery.
At
the same time, despite studying the societies at the centre of the original
historical model of the ‘modern world system’[5],
few attempts have been made to interpret British post-medieval archaeology in a
global perspective[6].
Yet any attempt to understand, for instance, the development of the
architecture or urban form of eighteenth century Bristol without reference to
the economic, cultural and moral exchanges of the ‘Triangular Trade’[7]
denies a context which was central to the understanding, motivations and wealth
of contemporary Bristolians.
The
importance of considering ethnicity and adopting a global perspective, and
moreover the crucial relation between these issues in the later historical
period, have become increasingly clear during my study of the
archaeological remains of colonial landscapes in the eastern Caribbean. In a
discussion of the relationship between racial classification and ethnic
expression in the new colonial situations of the New World from the seventeenth
century, I shall suggest an alternative to the individuating impulses in
previous definitions of ethnicity and possible future directions for the
archaeology of this important subject.
Defining
Ethnicity
The
identification of past social identities and cultural differences is central to
contextual interpretation of archaeological remains (Shennan,
1989: 1). Previous definitions of ethnicity may be divided between
‘primordial’ beliefs in the innate nature of ethnicity, and ‘instrumentalist’
or ‘situationist’ emphasis upon ethnicity as a category mobilised in social
relations for self-interested
reasons[8]. Clearly,
the recognition in anthropology that there are no ‘people without history’[9],
and that those histories involved complex, often long-distance, interaction
with other societies, means that a simple primordial notion of pristine ethnic
identity is no longer tenable.
Equally,
the adoption of an entirely relativistic model is denied not only by the
evident considerable influence of ethnicity upon modern political and social
interaction, but also by the historical contingency of the development of
specific ethnicities. In the case of the colonial West Indies, the contemporary
political imperative of recognising African-American perspectives, which have
been historically denied by white racism, makes a dismissal of African-American
ethnicities in the past entirely inappropriate. The recognition of ethnic
histories must then spur us on to an ‘archaeology’ of ethnicity, an
anthropologically-informed examination of the generation, change and decline of
ethnic identities over time (cf. Harrison, 1995).
The
main failure of the instrumentalist theory of ethnicity lies in its theory of
agency, which borrowed from the influential ‘transactionist’ approach of
anthropologist Fredrik Barth, best exemplified by his study of the political
organisation of the Swat Pathan of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1950s (Barth, 1959). Recording individuals’ affiliation to ethic
identities for self-interested reasons, Barth identified self-categorisation as
the force maintaining ethnic boundaries over time[10]. But as
Asad (1972) has pointed out, the stratified nature of
Pathan society underlines the fact that historical shifts in collective
position and class interest, rather than individual motive or identification,
defined shifts in ethnic identity.
Asad’s
point may be generalised. Unless we are to adopt a Thatcherite disbelief in
society, we cannot (contra Jenkins, 1997: 166) hold that collective social
forms appear ‘as emergent patterns generated by the ongoing ins and outs of
individuals interacting’. Siân Jones has similarly criticised the apparently
arbitrary ‘choice’ of distinctive cultural forms in instrumentalist’ models.
Her answer is that
‘the self-conscious expression of ethnicity
through material culture is linked to the structural dispositions of the habitus,
which infuse all aspects of the cultural practices and social relations
characterising a particular way of life…[T]he manifestation of inter-ethnic
relations, and the expression of ethnic difference, are linked to cultural
practices and social differentiation within the group’ (1997: 120-1; my emphasis)
The
appeal of using the concept of habitus is that Barth’s free-floating
‘subjective identities’ are contextualised (Shennan, 1989:
16). Jones explores this approach in a reappraisal of Romanization in Britain.
She highlights the different contextual meaning of the material culture
recovered by archaeologists according to ‘locales’ - whether rural or urban,
public or private, military, etc.
But
how do we define the ‘group’ within which Jones sees ethnicity being worked
out? Jones hints at but does not explore the creation by the expansion of the
Roman empire of ‘new forms of social interaction and social relationships’ for ‘Roman’ and ‘native’[11].To
add a further scale of analysis to her study, we may use Woolf’s (1990) location of Roman Britain within a world system to
imagine a Romanization in which a package of styles, attitudes,
practices and items of material culture - the idea of ‘Roman’ ethnic
identity - was available in peripheral Britain for adoption and display. Such a
model would push us to identify a semiotic dimension to the Roman
world system[12].
The
position adopted here aims to complement Jones’ local scales of analysis and
individual habitus by raising the possibility that ethnogenesis and
ethnic identity are partly the result of participation in a global system of cultural interaction[13].
As a working definition we may define ethnicities as self-defined social
categories, ‘emerg[ing] as
situational consequences of increasing contacts’[14],
while retaining a consciousness of the categorising role and extreme power
relations of the racial slavery, which emerged on the plantations of the New
World.
Ethnicity and New World Slavery
The
seventeenth century saw the development of a proto-capitalist plantation
economy in Brazil, the Caribbean and the Chesapeake. From the mid seventeenth
century, the eastern Caribbean saw the subjugation of the native Carib
population, the forced transportation of white Irish indentured labourers (in
what has been called the ‘Irish slave trade’[15]),
and the development of the African slave trade. An estimated total of nine and
a half million African men and women were brought to the New World as slaves (Curtin, 1969), and several million more may have died
during the ‘Middle Passage’ from West Africa.
British,
Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Swedish and came together in trade and war.
Cutting across social class and national origin, religious identities included
significant Jewish communities, Protestants, Catholics and non-conformists, as
well as African and Native American religious traditions. A process of complex
ethnogenesis and cultural interaction between black, white and red[16]
took place. This was underwritten by shifting hegemonic racial categorisation[17],
worked out in the oppressive new regimes of the plantation. I want to explore
these processes of domination/race and resistance/ethnicity before considering
their archaeological visibility.
Domination/Race
Irish
populations in the Eastern Caribbean
The
complex development of ethnic categorisation is exemplified by English
attitudes to the Irish population of the eastern Caribbean. As early as 1634, an
estate on Montserrat was described in the diary of one Father Andrew White as
‘a noble plantation of Irish Catholique, whome the Virginians would not suffer
to live with them because of their religion’. The complex attitudes towards
Irish populations in the New World are further evidenced by English Protestant
rule on Montserrat leading to Catholic services taking place in secret, isolated locations[18].
Anti-Irish attitudes were reinforced by a
general fear of rebellion, especially after the revolts of Irish servants on St
Kitts in 1666 and on Montserrat in 1667. By the late 17th century, the Irish in
the Leeward Islands are recorded as comparing their situation to that of black
slaves. In 1701 anti-Irish legislative action was taken on Nevis to prevent
‘papists’ and ‘reputed papists’ from holding public office or coming to the island as settlers[19].
In the early eighteenth century while an
‘equation…between African Negroes and slavery’ developed in the Americas[20],
an increasing incorporation of the Irish population into the white community
took place - treated ‘if anything…as tolerable social misfits’ (Beckles, 1990: 522).
Racial
Slavery and capitalism
The
Irish example throws the changing definitions of black slaves during this
period into relief. A general shift to social definition by phenotype appears
to have taken place, perhaps forming the origin of racial slavery, between the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the Caribbean plantation economy
developed and the Atlantic slave trade grew. This is the thesis of Robin
Blackburn, who sees on these plantations the development of ‘a slavery quite
unlike what had existed in any part of the Old World. Unlike Roman slavery, it
afflicted only those of black African origin or descent’[21],
and involved new regimes of surveillance and social identification defined
primarily by skin
colour[22].
As Eric Williams famously wrote, ‘slavery was not born of racism: rather,
racism was the consequence of slavery’. This was not so much as a strategy to
justify inequality, but as a result of the unimaginable harshness of the plantocracy[23].
However,
some historians have sought to locate the origin of modern slavery and
anti-black racism in the pre-industrial societies of the Old World. The
‘origins debate’ (Vaughan, 1995) has centred on whether
the plantation economies of the New World represented a departure from Old
World slavery and attitudes towards race. Indeed at first glance it may appear
that the institution of slavery persisted from antiquity and through the
medieval period, providing the source of ‘the mental habits and
institutions of European racism and
colonialism’[24].
As
David Brion Davis points out, black slave labour had been used on sugar
plantations in the early sixteenth century on the Portuguese colony of São Tomé
in the Gulf of Guinea (1997: 18). He sees medieval
origins for the racial slavery of São Tomé, and suggests that anti-black racism
was then simply applied to the New World plantation economies[25].
Similarly, Sweet has dismissed the model of a New World origin for anti-black
racism as a ‘mechanistic economic explanation’, and appears to find racial
slavery in fifteenth century Iberia[26].
Davis
and Sweet fail to examine the system of social relations in which slavery
existed. The slavery exemplified by the West Indian plantations of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a new scale and intensity, and a new
social disembedding of Africans - a ‘degradation of the slave condition’[27].
The new racial nature of slavery was related to more general proto-capitalist
processes of alienation and commodification, and the emergence in the
eighteenth century of a new nationalist language of political legitimisation in
Europe, which accompanied the growth of industrial capitalism and bureaucratic government[28].
While not inventing ‘the Other’, capitalism made use of the concept and
‘promote[d] it in new ways’ (Harvey, 1990: 104).
Resistance/Ethnicity
Having
defined the structural relationship between the nascent capitalism of the
plantocracy and racial slavery, how do we approach the new ethnicities, which
developed, on the New World plantations? In discussing African-American
ethnicity, it is important to emphasise the dehumanising horror of the Middle
Passage, which involved an alienation from African identities - a ‘social
death’[29].
But a challenge to such ‘catastrophism’ and an identification of a distinct
African-American culture derived from an African heritage has been central to
accounts of American black history since the anthropologist Melville Herskovits
(1941) first refuted the ‘myth of the Negro past’
by recording ‘Africanisms’ during his fieldwork in South America, Trinidad and
Haiti.
American
historical archaeology and Ethnohistory
African-American
ethnicity has received considerable attention from American historical archaeologists[30].
In the 1970s, American historical archaeology’s stucturalist approaches to
material culture (Glassie, 1975; Deetz,
1977) were brought together with an ‘ethnohistorical’ agenda. Ethnohistory
sought through interdisciplinary study to redress the imbalance in the
representation of minority social groups in the documented social history of early America[31].
The archaeology of slavery developed as ‘the archaeology of the inarticulate’[32].
The ‘untold histories’ of black slaves in the past were sought in the material
record.
Thus
Handler and Lange’s classic analysis of the Newton Plantation on Barbados
sought to bring together documents and artefacts for ‘ethnographic’
interpretation from the perspective of historical ‘slave culture’. Their
interpretation of colonial and locally manufactured artefacts recognised that
the same item may have been used and discarded in very different ways by
slaves, planters, middle- and lower-class whites, and freedmen of different socio-economic
strata[33].
The
results of this agenda are clear from a glance at the subsequent fieldwork on
Barbados, now one of the best researched islands of the eastern Caribbean.
Throughout, the overwhelming emphasis has been upon artefacts and
mortuary archaeology[34].
The physical anthropological analysis has attempted to ‘enhance
our understanding of the lifeways of Barbadian slaves and the material
conditions of their lives’[35].
Artefact studies have directly addressed issues of ethnic identity by
attempting to identify West African origins of African-American material
culture. Occasionally, items of West African provenance have been identified[36],
but the simple establishment of the presence of people of African descent in
the Caribbean seems ‘a bit beside
the point’[37].
Interaction
Rather,
it is the character of African-American ethnogenesis in the Caribbean, and of
the other interlinking ethnicities of the region in this period of massive
cultural interaction, which are at issue.
Creole pottery
and ethnicity
The
importance of this issue is highlighted by the debate within American
archaeology, recently outlined by Orser, about the ‘origin’ of Colono-ware[38].
This is a locally-produced clamp-fired smoothed or burnished ceramic found in
late seventeenth and eighteenth century contexts on plantations in the
Caribbean, Virginia and South Carolina. The ceramic is entirely replaced by
European-type glazed pottery in nineteenth century assemblages. At first it was
interpreted as ‘Colono-Indian ware’ (Noël Hume, 1962:
4), appearing to be the result of a mixture between European vessel forms and
Native American coarse and unglazed fabrics. Noël Hume explained the fact that
the pottery was found in contexts associated with slave accommodation on
plantations by arguing that Colono-Indian ware was produced by Native Americans
and bartered to African-American slaves. The image of Native Americans
bartering commodities to slaves, or perhaps even to Europeans (Baker,
1972), to survive under colonialism was always an improbable one[39].
The
ethnohistorical critique led to the dismissal of Noël Hume’s interpretation and
African-American slaves were defined as the main producers of the renamed ‘Colono-Ware’[40].
This hypothesis was appealing because historical archaeologists could at last
‘prove their contribution to knowledge’ by demonstrating a material connection
between Africa and the American South and the Caribbean[41].
More
recently Matthew Hill (1987: 138) has argued that the
distinctiveness of Colono-ware pottery is not its similarity to African or
Native American ceramic traditions, but its marked difference from European
pottery. Orser takes Hill’s argument further, emphasising ‘a system of
resistance and cultural diversity that strove to set itself apart from the
dominant, European culture’. Such an interpretation is based upon the view of
Colono-ware not as a ‘cultural marker’, but as ‘represent[ing[ a process of interaction’[42].
By
focusing upon local Creole processes of cultural syncretism archaeologists may
define and explore ethnicity as a ‘contextual phenomenon’[43].
The most exciting new development in the study of African-American ethnicity
has been an increased awareness of the importance of a detailed understanding
of historical West African societies, traditionally viewed as unchanging and
monolithic.
Ferguson’s
(1999) analysis of decoration on eighteenth century
bowls from South Carolina identifies marks which bear great similarities to
‘cosmograms’ recorded in central Africa (cf. Ferguson, 1992:
114-6). If we are to establish the shift of ‘cultural’ forms from Old World to
New, the social and cultural systems of all societies referred to, including
West Africa - the local circumstances within a global system[44]
- must be examined (Posansky, 1999). Similarly, if we
are to use a knowledge of West African decorative traditions to inform the
interpretation of motifs on Chesapeake
pipes[45],
the local and global historical processes of the slave trade must contextualise
our study[46].
One
example of the global processes which could be used to contextualise our
interpretation of West Indian ethnicities is Berlin’s (1996)
convincing case that a distinctive Atlantic Creole culture developed from the
trade between Portuguese and Africans in West Africa in the fifteenth century,
which led to the local development of an increasingly hierarchical social structure[47].
This realisation underlines the imperative to contextualise the generation of
New World ethnicities in terms of the historical shifts in the Atlantic slave
trade.
Global process
and local identity
In
the discussion of Siân Jones’ study of ethnicity above, I suggested that a
model of the historical processes of ‘global’ interaction could be added to her
approach. World systems theory is primarily concerned with economic history.
But having identified the global structure, can discussion be confined to
‘economic’ spheres? In the case of the Triangular Trade, Eric Williams’ thesis (1944) that profit from the West Indian sugar
plantations was a major factor in British industrialisation has been widely dismissed[48].
But recently it has been suggested that the supply of West Indian sugar was
influential not because of the industry’s role in capital accumulation, but in
its role as the first mass-produced luxury commodity, creating a modern consumer market in Britain[49].
This
argument turns the capital-accumulation model of British industrialisation on
its head (Austen & Smith, 1992: 197). But by
looking beyond the ‘the general economics of wealth accumulation’[50],
we may begin to identify the prime importance of apparently epiphenomenal or
‘superstructural’ elements of the historic world system, and attempt to set
historical ethnicities, like consumption, in a wider structural
framework[51]
(cf. Goodman et al 1995).
I
have outlined the position of current research on the domination through racial
classification and the resistance through the assertion of ethnic identity in
the colonial Caribbean and the Americas. An awareness of colonial and
ethnocentred bias has led to a preference among some analysts to discuss
‘resistance’ rather than ‘domination'[52],
but such a reaction risks maintaining the same colonial agenda ‘[reading]
identity through conflict, cross-cultural encounters through conquest, race
through racism’ (Bartels, 1997: 46-7). One alternative
perspective is to view the global and historical dimensions of Creolisation as
a context through which we can untangle the threads of local variability of black, white and red
ethnicities[53].
Turning
to colonial Europeans in the New World, Mark Leone has built upon Deetz’s
structuralism by making use of the of the idea of the ‘Georgian Order’ - a
general rubric of the individualisation and standardisation of material culture
and social practices - as a point of entry into the ‘cultural’ dimension of
emergent capitalist social relations in colonial America (Leone,
1988; Johnson, 1996: 202-4). The immense
possibilities of adding historical contingency, geographical connections and
local variation to anthropological structural-symbolism have been explored
further in prehistoric archaeology[54].
The concept of the Georgian ‘package’, the local manifestations of which may
vary considerably, could be used as an organising principle for the archaeological
interpretation of colonial European social identity - for analysis alongside
the other ethnicities of the colonial
world[55].
Part of this white ‘package’ would inevitably be the ultimate standardisation
of the eighteenth century - the development of racial slavery.
A Respectable
Trade?
The
issues raised above may be explored through a consideration of recent attempts
to address the multicultural heritage of Bristol. After the termination of the London-based
Royal Africa Company’s monopoly of English trade with West Africa in 1698,
Bristol grew to be the second largest slaving port in Britain. Although
eclipsed by Liverpool in the mid 18th century, the 109 years before abolition
in 1807 saw over 2000 slaving vessels from Bristol to West Africa (Richardson, 1996). The transactions of the triangular
trade included the sale of manufactured items to West Africa, and the
importation of sugar and tobacco from Caribbean slave plantations.
In
1997, Bristol City Council organised a series of events to mark the
quincentenary of Cabot’s voyage from Bristol to mainland America. During
preparations for the ‘Cabot 500’ activities, public consultation meetings were
organised. At a 
meeting in the St Paul’s district of the city, strong
reservations were expressed by members of the black community about the
uncritical and celebratory tone of the Cabot 500 festival, bringing to a head
feelings of ‘official’ silence about Bristol’s historic role in the slave trade[56].
To address this issue, the Bristol Slave Trade Action Group was established in
1998: an informal coalition of city councillors, members of the black
community, museum workers, teachers and academics. Several projects resulted
from the Group’s meetings in the City Museum and the Malcolm X Centre.
Publicity leaflet from the Respectable Trade Exhibition. © Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery, 1999.
Firstly,
a major exhibition on Bristol’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, A
Respectable Trade?, was held at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in 1999. It
became the most successful in the museum’s history, attracting over 160 000
visitors during the six months for which it was open[57].
Each part of the Triangular Trade was illustrated by a striking range of
artefacts and documents from Bristol, West Africa and the Caribbean: British
sugar cutters, furniture and snuff boxes, and abolitionist literature; brass
manillas traded from Bristol to Ghana, Ibo masks and tools, and iron shackles;
plans of Caribbean sugar plantations, and clay pipes recovered during
archaeological excavations on Nevis. ‘Lifelines’ of slaves and merchants were
presented though audio tape listening posts. A permanent slave trade exhibition
is due to open in Bristol in April
2000[58].
The
Action Group’s meetings also led to the creation of a ‘Slave Trade Trail’
around Bristol (Dresser et al 1998), highlighting the
trade’s influence upon the development of the urban landscape, and the survival
of this legacy in the fabric of the modern city. The Trail includes the sites
of sugar
refineries[59],
the Corn Exchange, Commercial Rooms and premises of the insurance and banking
companies, and the domestic architecture of merchants’ houses[60].
The Trail has been complemented by the 
naming of a new footbridge in the docks area of the city
after Pero, a black slave brought back to Bristol from Nevis by the planter
John Pinney in 1783[61].
The opening of Pero's Bridge, St Augustine's Reach,
Bristol, 16th March 1999. From left to right: Patrick Robinson and Paul Stephenson
(Bristol West Indian Parents' and Friends' Association), the Lord Mayor and
Lady Mayoress of Bristol, Paul Boatang MP, and Councillor Paul Smith. The
bridge was designed by sculptor Eilis O'Connell.
However,
the Slave Trade Trail underlines the difficulty of defining the limits of the
city’s ‘multicultural’ heritage (cf. Horton, 1999). For
instance, Clifton
Hill House[62],
now a University hall of residence, was built by Isaac Ware between 1746 and
1750 for the Bristol merchant Paul Fisher (Mowl, 1991:
62-3). Fisher’s fortune was derived from the Atlantic trade, and on this basis
the house was included in the Slave Trade Trail mentioned above. Yet this
wealth created not only the grand Palladian exterior of Clifton Hill House, but
an early example of a British Rococo interior, characterised by intricate
decorative stucco work depicting exotic animals, rare plants, and employing a figurative
style ‘received from the Moors and Arabs’ (Ware, 1756: 522)[63].
Fisher was by no means alone in his cosmopolitan tastes: a distinctive regional
Rococo style developed in South-West England and Ireland in the eighteenth century
(Mowl, 1999)[64].
The strength of the Rococo in Bristol was part of a particular intersection
between merchants’ industrial wealth and their international aspirations.
A rare example of evidence for the historic black population of Bristol. Tombstone of Scipio Africanus in the graveyard of Henbury Parish Church, Henbury, Bristol. Photograph: © Bristol City Museums & Art Gallery, 1999.
While
the engagement of Bristol City Museum with contemporary multicultural issues
has been very successful, the experience in Bristol over the past three years
has also underlined how little can currently be said about the city’s
multicultural past. Where traditional social history can define the economic
involvement of individuals and places with the slave trade, archaeology has the
potential to identify the material remains of a broader ethnic history,
involving migrant labourers from different regions of Britain and ethnic and
religious minorities; as well as wealthy merchants. With these issues on the
agenda, future archaeological investigation of, for instance, the housing of
migrant labouring communities or the religious sites of the city’s Jewish
community, may begin to redress the previous neglect of the surviving material
culture of historical ethnic minorities, and a contextual model of the
development of the urban population and landscape of Bristol may be developed.
Conclusion
Having
found the ‘situationist’
emphasis[65]
of mainstream ethnicity theory inappropriate for the dual process of hegemonic
racial categorisation and African-American ethnogenesis, I have sought to place
the processes of colonialism and Creolisation in a wider structural framework.
The modern world system was a ‘total’ system, and provides a new level of
analysis not only for economic transactions but also for the cultural and
political interaction, which led to both racism and new ethnicities. Similarly,
the new colonial societies were ‘total’ - and a multivocal archaeology must
attempt to recognise black, white and red histories through material culture
surviving as archaeological remains.
We
have a careful line to walk. Attempts to use scientific archaeological
methodologies to document African-American ethnicity and slave life in
isolation from the contemporary political agenda of black history carries significant risks[66],
while on the other hand the imposition of contemporary agendas may bias
interpretation of archaeological
remains[67].
And the central issue of ‘ownership’ of the sites of institutionalised and
quotidian anti-black violence needs to be addressed[68].
In
the case of the eastern Caribbean, the most promising avenue for achieving a
true archaeology of ethnicity is perhaps the analysis of the strange new landscapes
of colonialism into which past identity was written - the planters’ houses and slave villages of
plantations, churches and synagogues[69],
land cleared, enclosed and worked by free, indentured and slave labour, and
artefacts and architecture brought together from the traditions of three
continents in new circumstances. The landscape perspectives developed in
British pre-industrial archaeology have the potential to revolutionise the
site- and artefact-based archaeology
of slavery[70].
Ultimately
the implication of adopting a world-systems perspective on the archaeology of
ethnicity is that after local processes have been identified at site- and
regional-level they must be tied together with archaeologies of the societies
with which they were historically connected. In the case of the Atlantic slave
trade, an integration of fieldwork in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean, West
Africa, and London, Bristol and Liverpool would be necessary to fully
understand the material remains of a global process - not simply tracing the
international economic transactions of the modern world system, but truly
identifying it as a ‘multi-level,
complex system of social action’[71].
For the British and American traditions of post-medieval and historical
archaeology, adopting a global perspective may facilitate the development of a
unified theoretical, and integrated fieldwork, agenda. As well as integrating
academic perspectives, the acknowledgement of cultural diversity and
interaction in the past is central to achieving an ‘inclusive’ perspective in
archaeological practice and the presentation of heritage after Stephen Lawrence[72].