The role of black Barbudans in the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the colonial Caribbean and South Carolina

Abstract

Some significant problems remain in understanding the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the Caribbean and North America, especially regarding the role of blacks in that process. Research to date has identified the Greater Antilles, especially Spanish Cuba and British Jamaica, as the sole Caribbean sources of settlers who established the herding systems of, respectively, Mexico and South Carolina. Yet an open-range cattle herding system also occurred in the British Lesser Antilles, which provided many of the settlers for the South Carolina colony. Archival and field research in Antigua and Barbuda provide the basis for comprehensive reconstruction of that system's material culture and herding ecology, demonstration of the role of blacks in its operation, and comparison with other relevant systems to consider whether the British Lesser Antilles might also have been involved in the process through which open-range cattle herders established themselves in South Carolina during the late seventeenth century.