Search

New archaeological research inside the Christiansted National Historic Site in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands, has uncovered a wealth of cultural resources around the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse that have lasting implications for the largely Afro-Caribbean descendent Crucian community living in St. Croix today. Following a stump removal, exposing the remains of a Danish military stock warehouse containing 3,152 artifacts, two excavations targeting the dwelling spaces of royal enslaved Afro-Caribbeans recovered over 4,000 artifacts within the same warehouse structure. This new research brings into focus the daily lives of the enslaved Afro-Caribbean peoples residing within the walls of the Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse in service to the King of Denmark. The project also brings attention to the lives of the Danish officers who carried out their operations in the same space. This article explores the relationship between these two groups.

Ceremonial architecture of late precontact (A.D. 600-1500) societies of Puerto Rico consists of stone-lined plazas and ball courts (bateys,). Archaeologists use these structures to signify the onset of hierarchical “chiefly” polities and to interpret their regional organization. Problematically, little consideration is given to the costs of their physical construction and the associated organizational implications at local and regional scales. In this paper, we use data gathered through geoarchaeological field investigations to develop labor estimates for the plaza and bateys at the site of Tibes—one of the largest precolumbian ceremonial centers in Puerto Rico. The estimates provide a basis for addressing how these features were constructed at the site and are considered within the broader organizational contexts of incipient polities in the island's south-central region between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1200.