2009 (M. W. Hauser and J. Handler), Change in Small Scale Pottery Manufacture in Antigua, West Indies. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. December.
Today, in a handful of Caribbean islands (e.g., Jamaica, Martinique, Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, and St. Lucia), persons of African descent continue to manufacture earthenware pottery, generally somewhat loosely and variously referred to by modern Caribbean archaeologists as Afro-Caribbean pottery or ceramics. These small-scale industries have always played an insignificant role in insular national economies and at present they seem to have a very limited chance for long-term survival. Today they produce largely for the tourist market and are disappearing to varying degrees. Several of these industries have been ethnographically reported over the years, and these reports provide a base line from which to examine the changing demands and pressures confronting local potteries. Diachronic studies of these industries permit researchers to chart changes as these industries decline, and also provide a lens through which archaeologists can understand the ways in which local craft industries have confronted changing economic landscapes. Moreover, traditional locally made earthenware is today found in historical archaeological sites in the West Indies and ethnographic knowledge about local industries helps interpret the archaeological data. The following information on the little-known industry in the small island of Antigua, a former British colony in the Leeward island chain — today an independent member of the British Commonwealth — is based on limited field work, published literature, and personal correspondence with persons possessing first-hand knowledge.
Change in Small Scale Pottery Manufacture in Antigua, West Indies
2009 (J. S. Handler and S. Bergman), Vernacular Houses and Domestic Material Culture on Barbados Sugar Plantations, 1650-1838. Jl of Caribbean History 43: 1-36.
This paper describes the houses and household furnishings of the enslaved people on Barbadian sugar plantations, and traces the development and changes in architectural forms, including wattle-and-daub, stone, and wooden plank dwellings, over the several centuries of slavery on the island. We also treat the housing policies of plantation owners/managers, and explore possible Afncan and European cultural influences on the Barbadian vernacular housing tradition that emerged during the period of slavery.
Vernacular Houses and Domestic Material Culture on Barbados Sugar Plantations, 1650-1838
2009 The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans. Slavery and Abolition 30: 1-26.
Scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have not systematically addressed the question of what material objects or personal belongings captive Africans took aboard the slave ships and what goods they may have acquired on the Middle Passage. This topic has implications for the archaeology of African descendant sites in the New World and the transmission of African material culture. This paper reviews the evidence for clothing, metal, bead, and other jewelry, amulets, tobacco pipes, musical instruments, and gaming materials. In so doing, the paper provides an empirical foundation for the severe limitations placed upon enslaved Africans in transporting their material culture to the New World.
The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans
2009 Gizzard Stones, Wari in the New World, and Slave Ships: Some Research Questions. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. June.
Argues that archaeologically recovered so-called gizzard stones were not utilized for playing wari, the African board game, by African descended populations in the United States, reviews documentary and ethnographic evidence for the presence of wari in the United States and the Caribbean, and discusses the documentary evidence for the presence of African games aboard British slaving vessels during the Middle Passage.
2009 (J.S. Handler and K. E. Hayes), Escrava Anastácia: The Iconographic History of a Brazilian Popular Saint. African Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Africa in a Global World 2: 1-27.
This article describes the transformation of an image depicting an unnamed, enslaved African man wearing a metal facemask, a common form of punishment in colonial Brazil, into the iconic representation of the martyred slave Anastácia/Anastasia, the focus of a growing religious and political movement in Brazil. The authors trace the image to an early 19th century engraving based on a drawing by the Frenchman Jacques Arago. Well over a century later, Arago’s image increasingly became associated with a corpus of myths describing the virtuous suffering and painful death of a female slave named Anastácia. By the 1990s, Arago’s image (and variations of it), now identified as the martyred Anastácia/Anastasia, had proliferated throughout Brazil, an object of devotion for Catholics and practitioners of Umbanda, as well as a symbol of black pride.
Escrava Anastácia: The Iconographic History of a Brazilian Popular Saint
2009 (J.S. Handler and M. Tuite) The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record.
The approximately 1,235 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public – in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.
2008 Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Smoking Pipes, Tobacco, and the Middle Passage. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. June.
This paper briefly addresses tobacco consumption and pipe smoking in Western Africa, and the relevance of these practices to the Atlantic slave trade as well as to the material culture of captive Africans during their forced passage to the New World.
Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Smoking Pipes, Tobacco, and the Middle Passage
2007 (J. Handler and N. Norman), From West Africa to Barbados: A Rare Pipe from a Plantation Slave Cemetery. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. September.
Discusses a distinctive short-stemmed earthenware pipe that was excavated in a plantation slave cemetery in Barbados in the early 1970s; since its excavation nothing similar has been reported from African descendant sites in British America. Archaeological and documentary evidence argue for a Gold Coast provenience sometime during the late 17th or early 18th centuries.
From West Africa to Barbados: A Rare Pipe from a Plantation Slave Cemetery
2006, 2007 Bibliographic Addenda to Guides for the Study of Barbados History, 1971 & 1991: Installment One, Installment Two. Jl. of the Barbados Mus. and Hist. Soc. Vol 52: 35-53; Vol 53: 199-211.
Published and some manuscript materials that have come to my attention since the publication of “A Guide to Source Materials for the Study of Barbados History, 1627-1834″ ( Southern Illinois University Press, 1971; reprinted Oak Knoll Press, 2002), and “Supplement to A Guide to Source Materials for the Study of Barbados History, 1627-1834″ (The John Carter Brown Library, 1991).
Bibliographic Addenda to Guides for the Study of Barbados History, 1971 & 1991: Installment One
Bibliographic Addenda to Guides for the Study of Barbados History, 1971 & 1991: Installment Two
2007 From Cambay in India to Barbados in the Caribbean: Two Unique Beads from a Plantation Slave Cemetery. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. March.
In the early 1970s, archaeological investigations at Newton plantation in Barbados recovered the skeletal remains of 104 individuals, interred from approximately 1660 to around 1820. Twelve of the burials were associated with close to 900 beads. These beads represented a variety of types, including two distinctive large reddish-orange carnelian beads. Despite the excavation of additional burials at Newton in the late 1990s which also recovered some beads associated with several burials, and considerable archaeological work since the early 1970s in African diasporic sites in the Caribbean and North America (including the massive “African Burial Ground” in New York City, as far as I can ascertain the two Newton specimens are still the only examples of their kind from New World sites. They remain unusual and unique material legacies of the transatlantic slave trade to Britain’s American colonies.
From Cambay in India to Barbados in the Caribbean: Two Unique Beads from a Plantation Slave Cemetery