Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Slavery at a Cuban Coffee Plantation / 195
slaved community without slaveholder ledgers or other records indicating
what foods were purchased for them. Most of the identi¤able bone is pig (Sus
scrofa), an animal typically raised in house or barnyard situations rather than
herded like cattle (Bos taurus), sheep (Ovis aries), or goat (Capra hircus) (Reitz
and Wing 1999:285–286). Joseph Dimock, a nineteenth-century visitor to
Cuba, observed that enslaved Cubans were permitted to “raise chickens, a pig,
and sometimes a mare” (1998 [1846]:96). Therefore, the recovered food remains
were more likely from slave-owned animals than those raised on the
stock-raising farm. Discrete trash deposits containing organic refuse, however,
have not yet been uncovered at the El Padre slave village, so any de¤nitive
statement regarding slave diet at the cafetal must await additional excavations.
Craft production offered enslaved people another possibility for making
items for their own use and for trade. Abiel Abbott observed enslaved Cubans
making hats from palm leaves in the quote cited, and it is likely that they
made other items from these leaves. Unfortunately, it is dif¤cult to document
the making of basketry and other textiles from archaeological sources. While
the archaeological evidence for craft production at the El Padre slave village
is slim compared to African-American sites that have yielded evidence of
pottery-making, wood-working, button-making, or iron-working, a few artifacts
suggest craft-making activities. Glass scrapers offer one possibility. These
artifacts made from broken bottle glass are similar to those found at other sites
occupied by people of African descent (Armstrong 2003; Wilkie 1996). These
scrapers could be used for a variety of purposes, but they are most often associated
with wood-working. Another possibility of craft production is the
reuse of discarded pipe bowls for smoothing or polishing. The interior surfaces
of several recovered pipe bowl fragments exhibit considerable wear resembling
that found on objects used for smoothing or polishing materials
such as wood, bone, hide, or possibly pottery. The wear appears to have occurred
after the pipe bowls were broken and were no longer usable for smoking.
Expressive Culture
The most curious artifacts recovered from the El Padre slave village are ceramic
discs measuring 8–15 mm. They appear to have been made by smoothing
the edges of broken ceramics into rounded forms. Perhaps the pipe bowl
fragments were used to make these artifacts. Similar discs have been found at
a variety of sites in other world areas, for example, at post–European contact
sites in Africa (Gerard Chouin, personal communication, 2001) and at Spanish
missions in California (Lourdes Domínguez, personal communication,