St. Nicholas Abbey Workers' Village

Overview

The historical significance of St. Nicholas Abbey has for many years spurred the interests of historians and archaeologists. In 2006, Frederick H. Smith met with Shaun Coombs, a Barbadian architectural student who was supervising the restoration of St. Nicholas Abbey for its new owner Larry Warren. Jerome Handler had met Coombs on an earlier visit to St. Nicholas Abbey and was impressed with Coombs’ enthusiasm for the restoration project. Handler urged Smith to contact Coombs when he arrived in Barbados at the start of his 2006 summer field season. Coombs was indeed enthusiastic about the restoration project. When Smith visited Coombs at St. Nicholas Abbey in 2006, his energy was contagious. They discussed plans for archaeological investigations that would provide insights that would help in the restoration and celebration of this important historical site. In 2007, Smith and Sean Devlin, an archaeology graduate student, began investigations at St. Nicholas Abbey with the assistance of undergraduate field school students from the College of William and Mary.

The first archaeological work at St. Nicholas Abbey was undertaken in the summer of 1987 by a team of students headed by Handler (1989). The objective of the 1987 fieldwork was to locate the estate’s slave burial ground and record information about plantation slave life at St. Nicholas Abbey. Handler’s project stemmed in part from his earlier study of mortuary practices and human skeletal remains from Newton Plantation in the Parish of Christ Church. The 1987 project sought to build on the Newton study and to create predictive models for locating slave burial grounds. Handler and his team also surveyed a number of other plantations in Barbados during that project, including Hanson, Guinea, Malvern, and Bissex Parks. Although Handler and his team were unable to locate a slave burial ground at St. Nicholas Abbey, their investigations included a brief archaeological survey and some shovel testing of named plantation fields, as well as documentary and ethnographic research of the property.

During the 2007 field season, staff and workers on the estate learned about Smith’s earlier research on cave sites used by enslaved peoples in Barbados (Smith 2008). They told Smith of caves in the gully that runs along the western edge of the estate where he might find material culture used by enslaved peoples from St. Nicholas Abbey and surrounding estates. Smith and his students walked the gully identifying several caves that did, in fact, possess early historic material culture (Smith and Bassett under review). Upon reaching the gully’s end students and staff sought an easier return route through some cart roads that paralleled the gully. It was along one of these carts roads in a field of thick sour grass that they saw several large piles of stone (cossie).

In 1987, Handler (1989: 42) had noted this area along the ridgeline and wrote, “This grass piece contained a scattering of apparent stone mounds, which several informants reported as the remnants of about three or four old stone houses.” Given the objective of the 1987 fieldwork, this area had limited research potential for the discovery of a burial ground. Additionally, the “houses” were ascribed to the post-emancipation tenantry period of the plantation, which was largely outside the focused interests of Handler’s study. The 2007 examination of the area led to the discovery of a large amount of late eighteenth and nineteenth century material culture apparent on the ground surface. For this reason, two test excavation units were placed within a portion of the field known as Crab Hill to determine the research potential these materials might have for the study of slavery and post emancipation plantation life for workers in Barbados.

Documentary Evidence

Documentary evidence concerning the lives of those who lived and worked at St. Nicholas Abbey over the past 350 years is rather spotty and inconsistent. The estate was established in the late 1650s during the apex of the island’s sugar revolution, when the early English settlers, John Yeamans and Benjamin Berringer, formed a business partnership in land speculation. In 1647 they accumulated 365 acres in the parishes of St. Peter and St. Andrew, dividing the land into two neighboring plantations. Historians have credited Berringer as the original proprietor of the English-styled mansion. He died suspiciously very shortly after it was completed, in 1661, and ten short weeks later Yeamans married his former business partner’s wife, Margaret Berringer.

Rumor spread that Yeamans and Margaret Berringer had poisoned Benjamin, but the investigation found no foul play. The union resulted in the merger of the two plantations and the resulting core is now known as St. Nicholas Abbey plantation. The estate appears on Richard Forde’s map of Barbados ca.1674, where it is represented by the names Berringer and Yeamans, as well as a generalized depiction of a great house and windmill. Yeamans would later establish an English/Barbadian settlement in South Carolina and become the colony’s first governor.

On the death of Margaret Berringer the plantation passed to her eldest son, and then to his daughter, Susannah, and through inheritance laws of the period, to her husband George Nicholas. It is believed that the name Nicholas Abbey derives from George Nicholas whose family seat was in Bath Abbey. It is not clear when the St. was added to the plantation’s name. Nicholas ran the estate into debt by 1724, resulting in the plantation being purchased by the chancery court judge, Joseph Dottin, who gifted each of his daughters with a plantation upon marriage. He willed St. Nicholas Abbey to his daughter Christian upon her marriage in 1746 to John Gay Alleyne, one of the most prominent eighteenth-century Barbadian planters. After his death in 1801 the estate reverted to the Dottin family, but ultimately went into debt and fell once more into chancery. By 1834, the estate was owned by the Bristol banker and merchant Charles Cave. It remained in the Cave family throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remains a unified plantation and a single property into the current day. In 2005 Colonel Stephen Cave died without issue marking the end of the Cave family’s one hundred and seventy year ownership of the estate. Cave’s distant nephew, James Petrie, maintained the estate for a short time. In 2006, Larry Warren, a renowned architect in Barbados, purchased the estate and restored it to its seventeenth and eighteenth century grandeur. Warren has also refurbished the estate’s steam engine for sugar making, and purchased an alembic, which they use to make the estate’s world-class rum.

Documentary evidence concerning the lives of enslaved peoples at St. Nicholas Abbey is available for the late slavery period. An 1834 Slave Register lists the name, sex, age, occupation, color, and country of origin of 174 enslaved peoples who were part of the estate. Nearly all (98%) of the enslaved at St. Nicholas Abbey were born in Barbados. Only 8% were domestics while the others were described as laborers. Other evidence about slavery at St. Nicholas Abbey has been gleaned from the study of John Gay Alleyne (Bergman and Smith 2014). Alleyne made several “improvements” at St. Nicholas Abbey during the late eighteenth century, when the anti-slavery campaign was initiated in England. His most challenging renovation at St. Nicholas Abbey was replacing the African-styled houses and villages on his estate. He did this by implementing English-designed housing for a small number of the enslaved at the plantation, which is the settlement on the ridgeline known as Crab Hill and the basis of this DAACS Research Consortium (DRC) study.

Excavation history, procedure, and methods

The 2007 field program directed by Smith sought to expand on the earlier work of Handler and his team. The primary objective of the 2007 field program was to assess the integrity of archaeological deposits at the property and to determine the potential for long-term archaeological study of St. Nicholas Abbey. In contrast to the work by Handler and his team, the fieldwork conducted in 2007 was not concerned with locating the estate’s slave burial ground. Instead, Smith and his students were interested in elucidating the complex social relations on the plantation and investigating the lives of all social classes who resided on the estate. Excavations were conducted around the great house to gain insights into the material conditions of the planter class. The team also sought to locate the estate’s slave village(s), and examine early plantation slave life in Barbados. More importantly, the field program hoped to advance public archaeology in Barbados and to provide insights that would help Warren in the restoration and interpretation of the property. Several methods of investigation were used at different locations on the property throughout the different field seasons. In combination, these methods sought to provide both a broad and in-depth preliminary understanding of some of the resources at St. Nicholas Abbey.

Survey

A limited amount of survey work was carried out on the property in accordance with standard archaeological practice and conditions on site. Surveys were conducted through the process of field walking and visual inspection of artifacts found on the surface of the ground by students and faculty. Portions of forested gully immediately to the south and west of the great house were surveyed and inspected in this fashion. Visual inspection was supplemented by the collection of artifacts in the Porch Door and Still Pond fields, and the ridgeline on Crab Hill. Artifacts collected from each location were placed in plastic bags and labeled with contextual information about the location of recovery.

The main objective of these surveys was to gain a general knowledge of the location of possible archaeological resources on the property. The rational for the surface collection survey was two fold. Survey is an economical means to gain a generalized impression of the archaeological resources in an area. While these methods do not allow for an in-depth understanding of the full potential of archaeological resources; they do provide information about the chronology and function of different areas of the property.

The Crab Hill site, which was the focus of the 2014 DAACS Research Consortium study, was located on a slight ridge covered in sour grass at the edge of Negroe Yard field north and west of the factory. Handler argues that the name Negroe Yard (or variations of that name) on sugar plantations indicate the likely location of slave villages (Handler 2002). Stephanie Bergman, a graduate student at the College of William and Mary, oversaw a shovel test survey of Negroe Yard in 2009. That survey recovered a great deal of material culture, including early-eighteenth-century ceramics. It is possible that an early slave village was located in that field and later moved to the ridgeline at Crab Hill. It is also possible that as the population on the estate increased the ridgeline was used for housing. Moreover, the stone dwellings on Crab Hill may have been part of a broader late eighteenth-century effort by Sir John Gay Alleyne to improve the conditions of enslaved workers at St. Nicholas Abbey by building more durable stone dwellings rather than the traditional waddle and daub structures (Bergman and Smith 2014). Crab Hill sits on a ridge immediately behind Negroe Yard. Due to the distance separating Crab Hill from the excavations around the main house, this area was recorded using its own datum established from a boulder at a cart road crossroads dividing several sugarcane fields.

The St. Nicholas Abbey Worker’s Village was covered with above-ground features, which consisted of large piles of stone, relatively uniform in size and averaging about 15-30 centimeters in diameter. The workers at St. Nicholas Abbey call these stone piles cossie and noted that they can be found on other estates in St. Peter. The origin of the word cossie is unknown.

The stone piles are the consolidated remains of what people in the area refer to as “slave huts,” and these piles are scattered throughout Crab Hill. It is possible that these stone piles could be used as markers for locating former slave villages, and further testing at nearby estates in St. Peter in the future will attempt to determine whether that is correct.

At Crab Hill, it appears that stones from the former coral rubble dwellings were piled up (especially long the eastern edge of the ridgeline) sometime after the demolition of those structures rather than being the decayed remains of those structures in situ. According to people who live and work at the estate, the last structure was abandoned in the 1970s and was part of a post-emancipation tenantry. The artifacts recovered from the site suggest that some of the structures may have been there long before emancipation perhaps as early as the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In the nearby village of Moore Hill stands one of the last remaining “slave huts” in Barbados, and archaeological investigations there in 2008 and 2009 indicate that it too may have been used as early as the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Test Excavation

Excavation of test units followed established norms of field practice. Units were established and recorded using a metric Cartesian plane grid with an established datum. These tests were conducted in measured units of either 1-x-1 or 1-x-2 meter dimensions. In 2007, two units were excavated by students under supervision of field assistant Sean Devlin using shovel and trowel with all soil screened through ½” mesh screen. In 2014, with the help of a research grant from the DAACS Research Consortium, Camille Chambers oversaw the excavation of twelve 1-x-1 meter test units by students.

When Smith and Chambers arrived at Crab Hill in 2014, a fire had only recently swept through the area burning off the thick sour grass and exposing the ground surface, as well as more stone piles. The units were excavated using trowel alone because the high amount of clay in the soils on Crab Hill made screening all but impossible. Units were excavated by natural layers (rather than an arbitrary depth system). The majority of the test units were excavated to a solid – though undulating – layer of coral limestone bedrock, but in some areas the excavation was halted upon reaching a sterile clay layer that represents natural subsoil. All units have a single layer deposit of sediment identified as A-Horizon. Upon completion of excavation, each unit was photographed and a base map and at least one profile were recorded. No subsurface archaeological features were discovered in these twelve test units.

Laboratory Methods

Basic preservation and organization of the recovered artifacts is an integral part of any field work. In 2007, the cow shed within the factory complex was converted into a temporary lab during the last week of the field season. In 2014, laboratory analysis was conducted in the evenings at the student dorms at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.

The students hand washed all recovered items that were deemed to be material culture. The process of artifact washing used water and toothbrushes to remove all lose particulate matter from artifacts, and a subsequent period of drying, usually two to three days, to ensure all extraneous moisture was removed. Artifacts were then catalogued and replaced in sealed plastic bags containing discrete contextual descriptions of the material. These bags were then placed into conventional storage boxes, and returned to the property owner for storage.

 

In 2014 Camille Chambers oversaw the cataloging of materials from the 2007 and 2014 field seasons using the DAACS cataloging system. After spending the early part of the summer in Charlottesville learning the DAACS system, she came to Barbados and began cataloging the materials from 2007, as well as the new materials recovered during the excavation of twelve additional 1mx1m test units at the site.

 

Summary of research and analysis

In 1989, Jerome Handler published a monograph that has a section devoted to his study at St. Nicholas Abbey.

Frederick H. Smith, Sean Devlin, Stephanie Bergman, and Camille Chambers are currently working on a report covering the different archaeological field seasons at St. Nicholas Abbey since 2007. The St. Nicholas Abbey archaeological research has resulted in two peer-reviewed journal articles, numerous conference papers, and three MA Theses (Bergman and Smith 2014; Smith and Bassett, under review; Devlin 2008; Bergman 2009; Mocklin 2009).  Stephanie Bergman is currently using materials from the site as the basis for her PhD dissertation at the College. SEM and XRF on locally made Barbados red earthenware recovered from the site are also part of a broader study concerning local pottery manufacture in Barbados (Seidow et al. 2014).

Moreover, Smith and Hayden Bassett have an article under review for an edited volume focusing on the use of caves and gullies by enslaved peoples at St. Nicholas Abbey and surrounding estates.

DAACS staff used correspondence analysis to seriate the 18 contexts from the St. Nicholas Abbey Worker’s Village.  Although assigned to the same stratigraphic group, SG01, A-Horizon, three temporal phases at the Village site emerged.

When contexts that comprise the Harris Matrix for the Village excavations are color-coded with phase assignments, it is obvious that depth is not correlated with time. This provides a potentially interesting insight into formation processes and suggests depth variation is a function of  post-occupation erosion.