Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Slavery at a Cuban Coffee Plantation / 189
Excavations at the El Padre slave village were conducted initially to examine
how enslaved workers lived in their quarters and modi¤ed these spaces to
suit their needs. A second objective is to evaluate the extent to which the
enslaved community at El Padre participated in independent economic activities
of their own interests: Did they produce food or craft items for themselves
or for trade? What kinds of objects did they purchase? With whom did they
trade? Students of slavery refer to these economic activities as the internal or
informal economy, or the slaves’ economy (herein I use the term informal slave
economy). A ¤nal objective is to analyze the meanings and usages of objects
beyond what they were originally intended by manufacturers or others
who created them (Thomas 1991:28–29). Capturing and understanding these
meanings present ongoing challenges to archaeologists.
Before launching full-scale excavations, it was necessary to establish the
site’s integrity. The slave village had obviously been farmed after its abandonment;
therefore, we needed to know whether any undisturbed remains of slave
houses or other structures and deposits could be located and identi¤ed. While
clearing the site of its thick vegetation prior to subsurface testing, the excavation
team identi¤ed a small posthole cut through the limestone outcropping.
I had observed similar posthole construction in the excavations of slave houses
on the island of Monteserrat in the eastern Caribbean. In building slave
houses on Montserrat, short posts called “knogs” were placed in these holes
and used in combination with stones to raise and support a wooden ®oor
aboveground (Howson 1995:105–106; Pulsipher and Goodwin 1999:18). Thus,
the small posthole was an encouraging indicator that archaeological remains
of slave bohíos were preserved at El Padre. Later in the ¤rst ¤eld season, we
found 18 more postholes of varying sizes associated with the initial post, forming
a rectangular pattern measuring approximately 5 × 7 m. In subsequent
¤eld seasons numerous postholes have been uncovered, totaling over 100 to
date, but it has been dif¤cult to determine the size, shapes, and orientation of
the structures or where one structure ends and another begins. Despite this
problem, four structures have been tentatively identi¤ed.
Recovered artifacts are primarily of interest in the study of the slave village,
for they indicate the kinds of objects enslaved people produced, acquired, and
used. It is often dif¤cult to document from written sources alone the items
acquired by enslaved people through informal trade networks. Thus, archaeological
¤ndings allow us to see enslaved people as both producers and consumers
within the informal slave economy of nineteenth-century Cuba. Artifacts
also provide temporal indicators for when the site was occupied. The vast