Mauritian indentured labour and plantation household archaeology

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a case study of an African/Indian Ocean plantation located in Mauritius, focusing on the daily lives of indentured labourers during the nineteenth century. Bras d’Eau National Park was a sugar estate that functioned from 1786 to 1868. During the 1830s, colonial landowners shifted from a reliance on enslaved labourers, who came primarily from Mozambique and Madagascar, to indentured labourers primarily originating in South Asia. Four hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children travelled to Mauritius to live and work on sugar estates. Household excavations were conducted in the detached houses and line barracks that make up the plantation domestic quarter. Domestic artefacts from these village spaces, such as South Asian smoking pipes, glass bangle fragments, buttons from second-hand British military uniforms, cowrie shells, rice bowls and traces of a diet based on pulses-and-rice suggest a persistence in South Asian cultural practices while also demonstrating a creative engagement with material culture from across the region. Grounded in comparative plantation archaeology, this study of the landscape and material culture at Bras d’Eau represents one of the first full investigations of nineteenth-century indentured men, women and children’s daily practices.