An Archaeology of Modernity in Colonial Jamaica

Abstract

The rise of modernity in Europe resulted in the redefinition of social relations between those in control of the apparatus of the state and economy on the one hand, and those who worked and lived within that apparatus on the other. This shift in the definition of the basic social unit from subject to individual citizen was fraught with tension, and resulted in vast changes in the lives of colonized people throughout the European sphere of control. While the material manifestations of these historical processes were many, this article considers how two phenomena associated with modernity impacted the lives of people enslaved at Marshall’s Pen, a Jamaican coffee plantation, in the opening decades of the 19th century. These two considerations included the spread of mass-produced goods mediated through the rise of consumerism visible through archaeologically recovered material culture, and shifting definitions of the relationships between space and social organization reflecting in changing settlement patterns of village life.