Sailors and slaves on the wood-cutting frontier: archaeology of the British Bay settlement, Belize
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Abstract
This research focuses upon the first 100 years of occupation of the British
Bay Settlement (Belize), a period characterized by large-scale transformation from an egalitarian maritime society to a mainstream British colonial society. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, small groups of maritime laborers seeking alternatives to their arduous occupations began settling in Spanish territory along the southeastern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula and cutting logwood for the European dyeing industries. In the sparsely inhabited forest, the settlers created a highly collective society based on a system of rules and values that had evolved among shipboard communities of Atlantic working-class mariners in response to their dangerous work environment, low status in a hierarchical economic structure, and social isolation from mainstream European culture. By the late eighteenth century, a socially stratified settlement utilizing a large slave-labor force had evolved with a colonial economy oriented toward cutting and exporting mahogany. Although both the early and later communities were characterized by seasonal encampments in remote up-river locales occupied by socially marginalized and economically disenfranchised populations, data show that there were few actual similarities between the two divergent social and economic systems.
A program of documentary research and archaeological survey
undertaken in the New and Belize River valleys located and investigated an
array of wood-cutter camps of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Seventeen historical-period sites were located and investigated through surface collection in the New River valley, many of which related to slave-based mahogany extraction. Excavations were undertaken at two Belize River valley locales: the barcadares was an early eighteenth-century community of independent logwood-cutting mariners, and is the earliest identified British settlement in Belize; Convention Town was a community of slave-owning wood cutters who evacuated the Mosquito Shore in 1787. Documentary analysis of maps, censuses, and accounts of travel is integrated with archaeological analysis of material culture from the wood-cutting camps in order to investigate, compare, and provide contextually-based explanations for the geographical patterning and social functioning of the settlement during the divergent eras of logwood and mahogany extraction.
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