Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Slavery at a Cuban Coffee Plantation / 193
beverages, were probably not provisioned to the enslaved community. All of
the pipe bowls are mold-made and were presumably mass-produced imports.
Several of the bowls are similar to those manufactured in the Cataluña region
of Spain (Arrazcaeta Delgado 1987). Maroon sites have yielded both locally
made and imported pipes. The latter are believed to have been purchased
from rural stores when the maroons were enslaved (La Rosa Corzo and Pérez
Padrón 1994:128 ).
Many of the objects recovered from the El Padre slave village are remarkably
similar to, and in some cases identical to, those artifacts found at slave
sites both in the United States and elsewhere in the Caribbean, such as English
tablewares and blue glass beads from Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic).
The major differences are in the ceramic assemblages. All of the
coarse earthenwares are of either Spanish or Spanish-American origin. They
include majolicas such as Triana blue-on-white and polychrome from Spain
and Aucilla polychrome from Mexico; utilitarian wares such as El Morro, possibly
imported or made locally in Cuba; and red-slipped pottery from Mexico
and Central America.
Only two sherds of hand-built pottery comparable to either colono wares
(Ferguson 1992) or the Afro-Caribbean wares (e.g., Armstrong 1999; Petersen
et al. 1999) have been identi¤ed. Referred to as criolla ware in Cuba, this
pottery has been recovered from numerous colonial-period sites dating between
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it has been primarily associated
with people who are identi¤ed as Amerindian or of mixed Amerindian
and African heritage. Even as late as the 1830s, a Spaniard visiting Cuba noted
a family of potters living in Guanabacoa, a present-day suburb of Havana city,
self-identi¤ed as “Indians” and producing earthenware cooking pots, jars, and
bowls (Andueza 1841:159). The two fragments recovered from El Padre were
apparently from a large, globular vessel known as a pote used for preparing
slow-cooked foods (Lourdes Domínguez, personal communication, 2002), in
much the same way colonoware was used in the southern United States. The
sherds are heavily charred, indicating that this vessel was well used.
With only two fragments, it is not possible to make a case for slave production
of criolla pottery at El Padre. It is more likely that the users of this
vessel acquired it through trade. Pottery-making was perhaps unnecessary for
enslaved workers at El Padre or at other Cuban plantations because of the
availability of a variety of utilitarian earthenwares and iron pots for cooking.
However, the absence of pottery-making may also speak to slave demography
in Cuba and sex ratios at El Padre. The production of Afro-Caribbean