Mapping Water: Archaeology, Colonial Landscapes and Water Insecurity

Constructed as sought-after places, colonies, as imagined by multiple actors in metropolitan drawing rooms, were also lived by those forced to resolve the predicaments those imaginations created. As sites of improvised forms of governance and trade, some colonies have been best characterized as rogue. For their marginalized residents, colonies presented a series of predicaments in everyday life that needed to be resolved. In this paper I describe, the priorities and predicaments, of differentially positioned ecological subjects to explore how these shaped how colonies existed in practice. For hundreds of landowners, the promise of colonizing discourses—that it would provide a pathway from merchant to landed gentry, from provincial port town to metropolitan elite, from shop to estate house—had proved to be a mirage. For the thousands of enslaved laborers, the violence (slow or otherwise) of colonizing discourses would provide a hard reality in which any such social, economic, or geographic mobility came with its risks and costs. Utilizing results from archaeological survey, multi-sited archival research, and excavation, I map increasing water insecurity and attempts to resolve it as landscapes were shaped to grow and process botanical commodities.

Mark W. Hauser is an historical archaeologist who specializes in materiality, slavery and inequality. These key themes intersect in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Atlantic and Indian Oceans and form a foundation on his research on the Landscape, the African Diaspora and Colonial Contexts. As an archaeologist who studies how people adapt to landscapes of inequality and contribute to those landscapes in material ways he employs historical, archaeological, and archaeometric approaches. He has three decades of research experience in the Caribbean where he has worked on numerous islands representing the varied linguistic and colonial histories of the region.  His current research examines how the Indian and Atlantic Oceans were connected between the 17th and 19th centuries through the lens of Danish colonialism.  Hauser is author of An Archaeology of Black Markets (2008) and numerous articles in journals including Antiquity, American Anthropologist, Antiquity, Journal of Social Archaeology and Journal of Method and Theory in Archaeology. His forthcoming book, Mapping Water on the Nature Island, Archaeologies of Enslavement and Environment in the Colonial Caribbean will be published in University of Washington Press’s ‘Culture, Place and Nature’ series.

Date
Thu February 27th 2020, 5:00 - 6:30pm
Location
Stanford Archaeology Center
Event Sponsor
Archaeology Center
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