An archaeological GIS is used to examine the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape of St. John, US Virgin Islands. Land use patterns are reconstructed using a combination of historic maps, tax records, and survey reconnaissance. The study demonstrates significant, heretofore undocumented, transitions taking place that reflect dynamic cultural and economic change within Danish West Indian plantation society that includes a significant trend towards land ownership by free-colored St. Johnians more than a half a century before emancipation. These venues of freedom are discussed in relation to broader patterns of estate consolidation and economic shifts.

The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, owned plantations in the Americas to fund missionaries who proselytized among native peoples and enslaved Africans while ensuring that colonists remained Catholic. Fusing the roles of planters and missionaries, Jesuits manipulated the spatial layout of plantations as a method to exercise social control over the laborers who were enslaved at these properties, as well as to influence the European and indigenous populations inhabiting the colonies and frontiers where mission work took place. Spatial layouts of French Jesuit plantations (habitations) dating from the mid seventeenth century to the 1760s in Martinique, Dominica, and Guyane reveal some of the ways in which missionaries organized space. These Jesuit mission plantations were situated in prominent locations in order to attract gaze, and features such as crosses, churches, and gardens displayed the Society’s prestige and mission work. At the same time, maximizing efficiency and conducting direct surveillance of laborers were reduced in importance.

Archaeological studies of plantations need to consider the scale of the historical circumstances which shape locally circumscribed Creole processes. These circumstances range from broad generalizations down to factors operating only at the local level of the individual estate. Recent excavations at Estate Lower Bethlehem, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, have recovered an artifact assemblage from a laborer village dating from the mid-eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, which was situated adjacent to a previously unrecorded cemetery and a large tamarind tree. This assemblage illustrates the importance of a multiscalar approach to Creolization in two ways: an analysis of the distribution of vessel forms of European pottery and "Afro-Cruzan" earthenwares; and the identification of fragments of lead-glazed slip-decorated redware pottery produced by Moravians.Recent research adopting a Creolization perspective stresses the historical context of Creolization as a model of culture change (

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Documents and maps describe settlement locations and objects possessed by the Carib, or Kalinago, in the Commonwealth of Dominica during the post-Columbian period. Archaeological testing at multiple sites in northern Dominica reveals that historical Carib settlements functioned as trading sites, observation posts, or refuges, but such testing has not recovered material culture described in the documents. Part of the explanation for the lack of correspondence between ethnohistory and archaeology is the inadequacy of the Carib ethnonym, which has been manipulated by the political and economic interests of European colonizers since 1492. Beginning with the first voyages of Columbus, the Carib were portrayed as warlike cannibals who raided the “peaceful” natives of the Greater Antilles. Carib-French contacts in the seventeenth century recorded origin myths and linguistic evidence that fit with the initial Spanish impressions of native Caribbean peoples. Archaeological findings reveal some of the heterogeneity that has been obscured by the Carib category recorded in the ethnohistoric sources.