The Relationship between Architecture and Social Organization

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Archaeological research on slavery in the Atlantic World has long focused on understanding the nature of cultural and social life in plantation contexts across the Americas. In recent decades, however, archaeological research across the African Diaspora has begun to explore the nature of resistance movements in colonial slave societies and the new societies forged in their ashes. The quest for freedom is taking center stage in archaeologies of enslavement, revealing how Africans and their descendants participated actively in the making of the modern world. And yet, one critically relevant exemplar of resistance has been absent from archaeological analysis, the independent states of post-revolution Haiti. Led by Prof. J. Cameron Monroe (UC Santa Cruz) and collaborators from Haiti and the US, this project explores how material culture was used to express political independence and identity in northern Haiti after the Haitian Revolution. The project examines how elites in post-revolutionary Haiti used public and private architecture, domestic objects, and everyday meals to manifest independence from France, as well as political control over a rural populace. The project will contribute to a broader understanding of the diversity of state-making processes in the Age of Revolutions, and the complex ways that material culture shaped national identity in the past and continues to do so in the present. The project contributes to long-term development plans for Haiti's National Historic Park, identified as one of 5 primary targets for cultural heritage development following the earthquake of 2010. Additionally, the project is providing field training experience for graduate students and college students from Haiti and the United States, particularly students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The Milot Archaeological Project (MAP) engages theories of sovereignty that highlight the use of material culture to make, and reject, claims to political power in the past. The project focuses on the Royal Palace of Sans-Souci, located in the historic town of Milot in Haiti's Northern Department. Sans-Souci, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982, was the primary royal residence of King Henry Christophe, first and last king of the short lived Kingdom of Haiti (1811-1820). Sans-Souci was built as an exceptional example of the Neoclassical architectural style, a tradition used around the Atlantic World to represent symbolically the imposition of order, rationality, individuality, and freedom - Enlightenment-era values that guided state craft in the Age of Revolutions. Archaeological research at Sans-Souci examines the relationship between the public expression of these values, represented in architecturally, and their reception, rejection, and reformulation within domestic contexts. Project participants bring together non-invasive archaeological survey, 3D modelling, and the analysis of artifact, faunal, and botanical remains from excavated domestic contexts to address these issues. This project provides an important Caribbean example to longstanding discussions about the relationship between Enlightenment-era ideologies and consumer practices taking root across the Atlantic world. Additionally, project is the first to explore the nature of state formation in post-colonial Caribbean, providing an historical rich and archaeologically robust case study with which to model state formation processes more broadly. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.