Caribbean Complexities: Markets, Slavery, and Ceramics in the Caribbean

This paper offers an overview of the archaeology of the early modern Caribbean.  While considered distinct from the historiography of the Caribbean, the questions formulated, methodologies employed, and and sites interrogated often emerge from overlapping interests in slavery and colonization.  That being said, the archaeology of the Caribbean presents an uneven topography:focused primarily on anglophone sites related to slavery and its effects.  The material remains through which archaeologists interrogate the past offers a different sets of lenses on the cultural experience of displaced, indentured and enslaved Caribbean folk, the scales of its expression, and the historical forces that shaped it. While offering considerable potential in comparative and multi-scalar analyses, archaeologists have been hampered by insularity of research design and circumscribed to linguistic frontiers.