An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue MountainsJames Delle has solved a number of problems in Caribbean archaeology with An Archaeology of Social Space. He deals with most of the problems by using historical archaeology, and clearly implicates Ameri canist prehistorians. Although this book is about coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains area of Jamaica, it is actually about the whole Caribbean. Just as it is about all archaeology, not only historical archaeology, it is also a book about colonialism and national inde pendence and how these two enormous events happened in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism. The first issue raised appears to be an academic topic that has come to be known as landscape archaeology. Landscape archaeology considers the planned spaces around living places. The topic is big, comprehensive, and new within historical archaeology. Its fundamen tal insight is that in the early modern and modern worlds everything within view could be made into money. Seeing occurs in space and from 1450, or a little before, everything that could be seen could, potentially, be measured. The measuring-and the accompanying culture of record ing called a scriptural economy-became a way of controlling people in space, for a profit. Dr. Delle thus explores maps, local philosophies of settlement, town dwelling, housing, and the actual condition of plantations and their buildings now, so as to describe coffee-Jamaica from 1790-1860. |
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An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s ... James A. Delle No preview available - 2013 |
An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s ... James A. Delle No preview available - 2013 |
Common terms and phrases
Accounts Produce acres African Jamaican analysis apprentices apprenticeship argued Arntully barbecues Blue Mountains bottles castor oil British capitalism capitalist cartographic castor oil Chester Vale Chesterfield Clydesdale coffee fields coffee plantations coffee production cognitive space Collins colonial commodities construction created crisis crop defined depicted economy of Jamaica enslaved laborers enslaved population European Figure gang Higman historical archaeology Jamaica Almanac Jamaican coffee Jamaican planters labor power land landscape landscape archaeology lb pork located material culture material space Mavis Bank mode of production negotiation nineteenth century Orser overseer overseer's house parish Paynter period plantation book planter class political economy Port Royal Praedial proprietor provision grounds Radnor plantation record regional elites relations of production rent reported restructuring Roughley Sherwood Forest slave labor slave villages social relations social space spatial structure suggested surveillance tion wage labor West Indian white estate Whitfield Hall Yallahs estates Yallahs region