Stone Artifacts and Glass Tools from Enslaved African Contexts on St. Kitts’ Southeast Peninsula

Abstract

St. Kitts, the first permanent English colony in the Caribbean, was dominated by sugar monoculture. During the island’s mid-eighteenth-century financial and political heights, the southeast peninsula was home to several sugar and cotton plantations. Recent excavations have recovered considerable data relating to the enslaved Africans who worked these plantations, including an assemblage of stone and glass tools. The stone tools, made from local chert, are dominated by cores, bifacial flakes, and utilized flakes, some of which are strike-a-lights or fire flints. The glass tools are primarily unifacial scrapers manufactured from bottle glass. Although enslaved African sites rarely contain more than a few of these artifacts, comparisons with sites in the USA and Caribbean suggest that chert and glass tool use among enslaved Africans was a widespread phenomenon rather than an isolated occurrence.

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