INTRODUCTION

The writer first had the opportunity to examine ceramics from Nevis in 1998, when Channel 4's Time Team TV programme undertook excavations at Mountravers and test pitting at Jamestown. An initial report on the ceramics was prepared for the resulting report, with a more detailed report compiled following analysis of the ceramics under more favourable conditions back in the UK. Subsequent excavations at Mountravers, together with field survey at the nearby site of a slave village, directed by Roger Leech and Bruce Williams, have yielded a much larger and more varied artefact assemblage which offers fresh insights into the material culture of a plantation house, while further fieldwork and test pitting at Jamestown in 2000, 2002, and 2003 yielded further evidence for the early settlement and later activity on that site.

In addition to ceramics from Mountravers and Jamestown, material has been examined from the 2000–1 excavations in Charlestown; plantation sites at Fenton Hill, Upper Rawlins, and Low Ground; and a post-emancipation village, Nugent’s. Other ceramics have been found in the island's fields during field-walking and as casual finds by local people. All seem to provide a consistent picture of the range of ceramics used on Nevis, and one which corresponds closely to that formed from the archaeological finds.

POTENTIAL OF THE CERAMIC EVIDENCE

The role of ceramics in historical archaeology is well-known and needs no reiteration here.

St Kitts was the last remaining small-island sugar cane landscape in the Caribbean Islands, which is the focus of a documentary film, St Kitts Scenic Train: Journey into an Island's Heritage (this can be viewed on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eSnMRCk-AMk; see also Found 2014). Construction of the railway, which circles the main part of the island, in the early 20th century (and accompanying construction of a large, modern sugar factory in the capital, Basseterre) allowed the island's sugar producers to compete in a rapidly changing global sugar market. Now, 350 years after the first clearing of the forest to create a classic sugar cane landscape between sea-level and the 1000-foot contour, sugar production was once again threatened by more efficient, large-scale production elsewhere. At the time of the 2005 meeting it appeared likely, and then proved to be so, that 2005 was the island's last sugar crop. The sugar railway is now used by a modern scenic train, which offers passengers an unparalleled journey into one of the Caribbean's most important heritage landscapes. The film (46 minutes) follows the train's journey, with side trips to great houses, sugar mills, and Brimstone Hill Fortress; and uses historical maps and drawings to complement the contemporary filming. It presents a view of an historic landscape which is now lost forever, and provides links to many of the papers included in this volume.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Found, William C. 2014, ‘The St Kitts Scenic Railway: A Journey into an Island's Heritage’, Chapter 17 in M. Conlin and G. Bird (eds), Railway Heritage and Tourism: Global Perspectives, London: Channel View Publications, 247–62.

INTRODUCTION

A survey of the landscape of Mountravers and the plantations to north and south was the second of the two sample surveys undertaken for the British Academy funded colonial landscape project (Preface), the first being the survey of St Mary Cayon and Christchurch Nicola Town on St Kitts, already discussed by Philpott (Chapter 7). This chapter is written so as to complement rather than repeat the earlier chapters.

As on St Kitts, the survey was set within the strategic objectives set out in the Preface (p. xx), specifically here: -

• 1 To undertake a reconnaissance survey of the 17th-and 18th-century colonial landscape of the landscape of Mountravers and the plantations to north and south

• 2 To identify the extent to which plantation centres have been abandoned or have changed through time, from the 17th to the 20th centuries

• 3 To identify the archaeological and above ground remains of the slave villages for the plantations

The survey area (Fig. 12.1) was located within the recorded north and south boundaries of the plantations to the north and south of the Mountravers estate as defined in modern times. Chronologically, the survey concentrated on the periods up to the introduction of steam technology for sugar processing in the 19th century.

This paper summarizes archaeological investigations conducted from 2003 to 2006 at the site of Jamestown, a ‘lost’ commercial settlement on the leeward shore of the island of Nevis. According to local legend and lore, Jamestown vanished in 1690, destroyed by a tsunami. The town's end came, without warning, on April 5, 1690, ‘about five of the Clock in the Afternoon,’ an eyewitness would remember in a letter to a friend in London. ‘We heard a rumbling Noise, like that of distant Thunder,’ the eyewitness wrote, ‘from the Bowels of the great Mountain, … in the very Navil of the island.’ This earthquake was different from trembles that had rattled the island before. ‘So strong was the Motion,’ the eyewitness recounted, ‘that … [a] few Moments after the Noise began, … a … Earth Quake, which shook the whole island to that degree, that all the Houses in Charles Town that were built of Brick or Stone, dropt of a sudden down from the Top to the Bottom.’ The sea then suddenly receded, ‘for a time forfeit the Shoar for about three quarters of a Mile together, and left a great Number of Fish of a large size to lye gaping upon the Sand, till it returned again.’ This ‘violent Motion of the Water’ repeated ‘diverse times’, and we can imagine that when the sea ‘returned again’ it lifted and then slammed mats of debris against walls, houses, and anything else that lay in its path. No other reports of this earthquake or its effects survive (Fig. 9.1).

This study of post-medieval colonial landscape archaeology brings together two separate but linked strands of research. The first is a research project initiated in 2001, when the author was awarded a larger research grant by the British Academy to assess the archaeological evidence for the early colonial settlement and landscape of the two eastern Caribbean islands of Nevis and St Kitts, a pilot project for the historical archaeology of the Atlantic rim, to be undertaken in collaboration with Dr Mark Horton, then of the University of Bristol, and Bruce Williams, then manager of Bristol and Region Archaeological Services in Bristol City Museums. The second was the meeting held in conjunction with the research project and convened by the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology on Nevis in 2005, and initiated by the author who was at that time its President. The meeting was to coincide with the research then being undertaken as a result of the British Academy grant and to provide, through discussion and subsequent networking, an input to the scholarly publications which would in due course emerge. This aspect of the meeting has been entirely successful, and many of the contributors now remain in contact as a result. Scholars who participated in the meeting have also been busy drawing on these experiences and contacts and producing their own publications in the interim, some of which should be highlighted here for their important contributions to Caribbean studies.

THE BRITISH ACADEMY PILOT PROJECT

Background

The English Leeward Islands were colonized from the late 1620s onwards. By the end of the century the islands were densely settled and their wealth, shipped principally to Bristol and London, far outstripped that of the North American colonies in total. This is a remarkable story, explored by historians but scarcely at all through its archaeology. Much of what might be known of the early settlement of the islands still awaits telling. The archaeological examination of much of the colonial landscape, the plantations and fields of the 17th and 18th centuries, has still to be undertaken, enabling the material record to be considered alongside the meagre documentary sources, decimated by fire, hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and other European powers.