Things you should know about The Spring before you use the data:

• Field measurements are in meters and centimeters.
• All excavated sediment was passed through 1/4 inch mesh.
• Shovel-test-pits are on the UTM grid system.
• Eighteen shovel-test-pits were excavated at The Spring village during the 2008 excavation season.
• An alphanumeric system was established for naming STPs that combine the Area, the Transect Letter, and the STP number. Transects were labeled alphabetically across the site. STPs were numbered consecutively within each transect. As a result, STP context numbers follow this format: 1-N-03, which translates into Pit 3, on Transect N, in Area 1.
• In the DAACS database, The Spring's village site is designated as Project "1215". Artifact ID numbers for artifacts associated with The Spring therefore begin with the 1215 prefix.
• Architectural and landscape features including terraces, roads, and exposed foundations were selectively mapped with a total station. The dense overgrowth in the village made it difficult to map landscape features in a systematic fashion; those represented on the site map are features that could be easily mapped with the total station and limited clearing.

The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative

The archaeological survey of the slave village at Tthe Spring Estate was conducted as part of the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative (SKNDAI). Funded by a JISCNEH Transatlantic Digitization grant in 2008, The St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative 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 9 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 70 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.

Acknowledgements

The work at The Spring was supported jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities (US) (www.neh.gov) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England of the United Kingdom acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/).

Leslie Cooper (DAACS), Carter Hudgins (University Mary Washington) and Derek Wheeler (Monticello) provided field support that was essential to the success of the project. Jesse Sawyer, Leslie Cooper, and Brian McCray analyzed the contexts and artifacts from each site.

Barbara Heath (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), in collaboration with MURR, is conducting the instrumental neutron activation analysis 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 in August 2009.

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 (http://www.nevis-nhcs.org/) provided invaluable help and support during our field work on Nevis.

Students from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica participated in a three-week DAACS Internship in Historical Archaeology during which time they surveyed a large portion of the New River I village.  These interns included: Krystle Edwards, Suzanne Francis-Brown, Clive Grey, Shailean Hardy, Khadene Harris, and Kenesha King.  The Reed Foundation, Inc. generously funded these internships.

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.