“Better Than We”: Landscapes and materialities of race, class, and gender in pre-emancipation Saba, Dutch Caribbean

This study aims to understand the materiality of Saba’s ideological landscape during its pre-emancipation colonial period. This is accomplished by understanding the dialectics, or inseparable relationships, between Saba’s geography, locally-situated ideologies of class, race, and gender in Saba’s social environment, and the processes behind these ideological relations that contributed to the material things that are found across Saba’s social landscape. This provides insights into archaeologies of poverty, approaches towards differentiating between low class and slavery in the archaeological record, and the importance of powered perspectives in defining and situating poverty on local and regional scales.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements 1 Friendly and Lovely, Though Small Background and approach The problems with connecting materiality to landscapes, and ideology to materiality 2 The Setting Positioning research locally Positioning research regionally Concluding remarks 3 Theory and Methodology Ideology The dialectic Class Poverty Race Gender Capitalism as a heuristic device for colonial Saba The socio-spatial dialectic Interpretation, sources, and postcolonialsm A theoretical structure for discerning the social and material vectors of class, race, and gender in pre-emancipation colonial Saba Closing remarks 4 Saba in the Documentary Record The sources and their history Saba during the early colonial period Saba during the seventeenth century Saba during the eighteenth century Saba during the nineteenth century Saba into the twentieth century Closing remarks 5 Excavated Plantation Contexts Fieldwork procedures Excavation Finds, features, and soils Off-site processing of artifacts Site mapping SB 004: Spring Bay Sugar and Indigo Plantation SB 001: Flat Point Sugar and Indigo Plantation SB 002: Flat Point well SB 003: Flat Point indigo vats SB 007: Spring Bay Flat SB 038: Core Gut Bay The Bottom sugar plantation Saban plantations and the acquisition of slave labour Spatial analysis of sugar plantations as a means for identifying enslaved African housing Enslaved African dry stone houses in Caribbean contexts Indigo production on Saba Closing remarks 6 Excavated Non-Plantation Contexts SB 037: The Fort Bay ridge site SB 036: The Bottom privy pit SB 027: Palmetto Point SB 026: Middle Island SB 039: Upper Hell’s Gate animal shelter SB 022: Little Rendezvouz SB 050: Thais Hill trash pit SB 025: Cow Pasture village cistern Closing remarks 7 Interpreting Race, Class, and Gender in Saba’s Domestic Spaces and Material Culture Housing, domestic architecture, and cisterns “The House”, class, and Saban culture Material culture in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Saba Diet Burial practices 8 The Social and Material Vectors of Race, Class, and Gender in pre-Emancipation Colonial Saba Seascapes, landscapes, and the “incomplete hegemony” Landscapes of class Landscapes of race Landscapes of gender Class in pre-emancipation colonial Saba Race and slavery in pre-emancipation colonial Saba Gender in pre-emancipation colonial Saba Interpreting Saba’s landscapes of race, class, and gender in its pre-emancipation colonial archaeology Differentiating between poverty, slavery, and low class in pre-emancipation colonial Saba Perspectives of landscapes and poverties Closing remarks References Appendices Tables Spring Bay boiling house Flat Point boiling house Spring Bay Flat boiling house English summary Samenvatting Curriculum Vitae

About the Author :
Ryan Espersen is an historical archaeologist, cultural heritage consultant, and public educator. Following his Research Masters in Archaeology at Leiden University in 2009, he obtained a Bachelor of Education (2011) to teach high school on the island of Saba, Dutch Caribbean as a means to start a local archaeological education program for both youth and adult residents. He co-founded the Saba Archaeology Center (SABARC) on Saba in 2012 and with government and NGO support, it expanded to include an archaeology office, lab, and museum. In 2012 he joined the European Transatlantic Slave Trade (EUROTAST) research group as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie early stage researcher for his PhD, hosted by Leiden University. He obtained his PhD in 2017 and have been consulting in heritage management and archaeology across the Netherlands and north-eastern Caribbean. He is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Cambridge, as the experienced researcher for project "No dollar too dark: free trade, piracy, privateering and illegal slave trading in the northeast Caribbean, early 19th century'".