Sherds of History
Sherds of History
Domestic Life in Colonial Guadeloupe
Investigating ceramic artifacts to better understand daily life in the French colonial Caribbean
Ceramics serve as one of the best-known artifacts excavated by archaeologists. They are carefully described, classified, and dated, but rarely do scholars consider their many and varied uses. Breaking from this convention, Myriam Arcangeli examines potsherds from four colonial sites in the Antillean island of Guadeloupe to discover what these everyday items tell us about the people who used them. In the process, she reveals a wealth of information about the lives of the elite planters, the middle and lower classes, and enslaved Africans.
By analyzing how the people of Guadeloupe used ceramics—whether jugs for transporting and purifying water, pots for cooking, or pearlware for eating—Arcangeli spotlights the larger social history of Creole life. What emerges is a detail rich picture of water consumption habits, changing foodways, and concepts of health. Sherds of History offers a compelling and novel study of the material record and the “ceramic culture” it represents to broaden our understanding of race, class, and gender in French-colonial societies in the Caribbean and the United States.
Arcangeli’s innovative interpretation of the material record will challenge the ways archaeologists analyze ceramics.
“A successful study of the incorporation of ceramics into the emerging Creole social system in the French West Indies.” —American Antiquity
“Arcangeli uses her analyses to give insight into social and cultural aspects of the society. . . . Recommended.”—Choice
“An invaluable source for both interpretive insight and comparative reference for domestic ceramic signatures as varied by class, race, occupation, and economy.”—Historical Archaeology
“Sheds new and interesting light on the daily lives of urban households in a Caribbean island during the slavery era. It is an innovative and illuminating example of the use of the methods of historic archaeology to study la vie quotidienne in a colonial society.”—Caribbean Quarterly
“A richly textured and nuanced analysis of life in the French Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from the point of view of ceramic users, rather than from the perspective of producers, in the context of daily use.” —Cambridge Archaeological Journal
“Readers gain a strong sense of how ceramics were used in everyday eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life and work, often by enslaved domestic workers gathering water, setting tables, cooking food and promoting bodily health.”—Antiquity
“Provides scholars with a trove of insights into the variety of Guadeloupe’s ceramic-related practices . . . and their similarities and differences across class and race divides and between colony and metropole that will resonate for ceramic analyses, future studies of Guadeloupe, and broader comparative analyses of colonial contexts across the globe.”—American Anthropologist
“A fresh look at the French Caribbean through the many forms of pottery used by colonists, Creoles, and slaves. Offers a trove of original and often surprising insights on foodways, gender, ethnicity, health, and even attitudes about water, cleanliness, and poisoning at this crossroads of the Atlantic world.”—Gregory Waselkov, author of A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814
“A unique and focused analysis of the ways in which clay-bodied materials infused everyday colonial life with meaning and distinction.”—Mark W. Hauser, author of An Archaeology of Black Markets
