Year: 1998
Type: book-review
Abstract: Any archaeologist studying New World plantations appreciates that space is a material artifact in some sense, and few archaeologists have been able to ignore the class based oppression shaped by plantation spaces.Nevertheless, few African-American or plantation archaeologists have taken the somewhat enigmatic notion of space as their material focus, and even fewer have probed how plantation spaces can be related to everyday experience as well as capitalism's broader systemic relations.James Delle's An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains ambitiously tackles all these subjects and examines them in heretofore poorly studied Caribbean coffee plantations.Delle champions a historical archaeology that conceives its focus as the archaeology of capitalism, which is certainly among the most ambitious yet ambiguously defined subjects archaeology could tackle.Delle focuses his perspective on capitalism by documenting how periodic crises in worldwide capitalism reverberated throughout British colonial sectors like Jamaica and found material form in the reorganization and restructuring of myriad Jamaican plantation spaces.Delle complexly weaves political economic theory, scholarship on space, cartographic analysis, and primary documents into an interesting study of how one modest corner of the world negotiated the complex interactions between a world political economy and various groups with quite different interests.Delle's research data comes from Jamaica's eastern highlands, which was a significant coffee producer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.Delle proposes to interpret the peoples in the region by understanding their relationships to broader socioeconomic currents and competing interests within the British colonial system and the island itself.This would seem a straightforward premise that would be well received in African-American archaeology, but Delle advocates a political economic theory that has not been warmly embraced by historical archaeologists.Readers hoping to find a record of excavated material goods from a handful of Jamaican quarters will find that Delle instead lays the foundation for such site specific studies and focuses his analysis on simply understanding what actually defines the complex entity of coffee plantation production.Rather than dwell on discrete assemblages of everyday material discards or quarters with an ambiguous relationship to broader socioeconomic structure, this book has a much broader and more ambitious scope; i.e., Delle attempts to understand the fundamental conditions like racist ideology, world economics, and geography that held together this profoundly unequal society and made it possible at all.It seems unreasonable to launch into the
Source: Choice Reviews Online
Authors: Delle, James A., Mullins, Paul R.
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1512880406