Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

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wares has been generally attributed to females. As mentioned, the slave trade
to Cuba was heavily oriented to the procurement of males (Bergad et al.
1995:27).
Household and personal objects, including ceramics, iron kettles, beads,
tobacco pipes, brewed beverages, and a few decorative items such as a metal
fragment from a parasol, attest to the fact that the enslaved community participated
in the internal economy as consumers. It is unclear how they were
able to earn money to purchase or produce items to barter for these items.
Gardening appears to have been the primary way enslaved laborers produced
commodities for trade throughout the Americas. In Cuba, as on other
Caribbean Islands, enslaved workers were often granted provision grounds
known as conucos. The extent to which slaveholders provided slave workers
with conucos varied through time and from plantation to plantation. Housing
the enslaved community in bohíos as opposed to barracones—masonry structures
containing prison-like cells for slave habitation—facilitated small backyard
food production of garden crops and keeping animals such as pigs and
chicken.
Meat products apparently were scarce food resources for the occupants at
the El Padre slave village. Written accounts emphasize the kinds of plant food
enslaved Cubans were provided. Many plantations reserved a small amount
of land for the cultivation for slave food of crops such as yuca (manioc),
malanga (a starchy tuber similar in both texture and taste to African yams),
sweet potatoes, or plantains (González Fernández 1991:173). All these crops
were grown at the cafetal in addition to corn (ANC 1841). Animal food remains
recovered archaeologically are usually a reliable indicator of the approximate
amount of meat consumed. In the case of the El Padre slave village,
however, fewer than 100 fragments of animal bones were recovered, and
these came from plow-zone deposits rather than trash pits. The small sample
size combined with the mixed archaeological context make the faunal assemblage
inappropriate for zooarchaeological calculations that could estimate the
amount of consumable meat or the contribution of meat to the diet. The
recovery of such a small amount of animal bone is surprising considering that
a stock-raising farm, also belonging to Ignacio O’Farrill, was adjacent to the
cafetal.
Perhaps the small amount of recovered animal bone is an indication that
slave community had little or no access to livestock raised in the potrero but
consumed salted or preserved ¤sh and meats containing little or no bone. It is
impossible to determine the kinds of foods that were distributed to the en-