Things to know about New River II before you use the data:
- Field measurements are in meters and centimeters.
- Only shovel-test-pit survey was conducted at the village.
- The datum and shovel-test-pits have UTM grid coordinates.
- All excavated sediment was passed through 1/4 inch mesh.
The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative
The archaeological survey of village at The Spring was conducted as part of the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative (SKNDAI). Funded by a JISCNEH Transatlantic Digitization grant in 2008, SKNDAI is an innovative collaborative project designed to further scholarship on slavery. The goal of SKNDAI is to develop an integrated digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of the enslaved men and women who labored on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century sugar plantations in the Caribbean. An international team of scholars from The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia (http://www.daacs.org), the University of Southampton's Nevis Heritage Project (http://www.arch.soton.ac.uk/Research/Nevis/Nevis.html), the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/) are working together to digitize and deliver on the web information from 18th-century plantations and their slave villages located on Nevis and St. Kitts. The result will be a first-of-its-kind digital collection of fully searchable archaeological and historical data from multiple slave village sites in the Caribbean.
Led by principal investigators Jillian Galle and Fraser Neiman (DAACS, US) and Roger Leech (UK, University of Southampton) and Robert Philpott (National Museums Liverpool/International Slavery Museum), SKNDAI undertook nine weeks of archaeological survey on three slave villages during the summer of 2008. In addition, Leech worked in archives in Nevis, St. Kitts, and the UK to recover nearly seventy 18th and 19th century documents related to slavery on these sugar estates. The archaeological and historical data have been digitized and are available through easy-to-use queries on the DAACS website and through the International Museum of Slavery's website.
Barbara Heath (The University of Tennessee) is conducting instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) on Afro-Caribbean ceramic sherds from these sites. Elaine Morris (University of Southampton) has conducted petrographic analysis on the same sherds sampled for INAA. The results will be available through DAACS in August 2009. Joanne Bowen, Steve Atkins, and their team at Colonial Williamsburg's Zooarchaeological Laboratory are analyzing the recovered faunal remains.
The end result of this project acknowledges both scholarly and non-scholarly user-communities by providing free access to information through two web-based portals: the research-oriented DAACS website (www.daacs.org) and the publicly-oriented International Slavery Museum website (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/).
Acknowledgments
The work at New River II was supported jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities (US)and the Higher Education Funding Council for England of the United Kingdom acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee.
Leslie Cooper (DAACS), Carter Hudgins (University Mary Washington) and Derek Wheeler (Monticello) provided field support that was essential to the success of the project.
Barbara Heath (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), in collaboration with MURR, is conducting the instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) on the African-Caribbean coarse earthenware ceramics. Elaine Morris (University of Southampton) is conducting the petrographic analysis on these same sherds sampled for INAA. INAA and petrography data will be made available through DAACS artifact queries.
Excavations conducted on Nevis and St. Kitts were made possible through the help of many hard working crew members. Lynsey Bates (DAACS/UPenn), Ivor Conolley (DAACS/UWI, Mona), Karen Hutchins (DAACS/UMass), Sara Corker, and Brian McCray (UVA) served as field and lab supervisors for the project.
John Guilbert and Paul Diamond from the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society (www.nhcs.org) provided invaluable help and support during our field work on Nevis.
University of Southampton students who participated in a four-week archaeology field school were also essential to completing the surveys at New River, Jessups, and The Spring.
