People at the Gates

During the early nineteenth century in South Africa, the British built Fort Willshire on the banks of the Keiskamma River. At its gates, they established the first official trade fairs and mandated that trade throughout the Eastern Cape be confined here. This area became a vortex in which a variety of people convened, traded goods, and influenced cultural and economic interaction. This chapter introduces the various Africans who gravitated to the region, claimed the surrounding lands throughout the river valley, and vied for economic resources and political power. By looking at the archival records, oral traditions, and archaeological evidence, research demonstrates that the region consisted of a variety of people with different backgrounds and affiliations. Furthermore, this area provides a model for understanding the impact of the British on the Xhosa, yet it is just as much a window to the interactions between various Xhosa factions and chiefdoms.

Everyday Entanglements

The policy of incorporating enslaved Africans into colonial military installations throughout the Caribbean was standard British military policy by the eighteenth century. The Cabrits Garrison, located on the northwestern coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica, was occupied by the British Army between 1763 and 1854. Using available archival and archaeological evidence from structures occupied by lower status military personnel, including enslaved laborers and soldiers of African descent serving in the West India Regiments (WIR), this chapter compares these residential quarters to provide a vantage point exploring lived experience within the formal landscape of British imperialism. Findings demonstrate the connection between these living areas and wider developments across the British Empire and Caribbean plantation culture while also revealing the varied and contradictory nature of identities resulting from dynamic labor relations and daily practices.

The Fort and the Village

Fort Vancouver, located in southwestern Washington (USA), was the administrative headquarters and supply depot for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in the Pacific Northwest, essentially its colonial capital between ca. 1825 and 1845. The documentary record for Fort Vancouver suggests a spatial segregation between the fort and the village along class lines which separated the elite managers of the company from its employees (engagés). Archaeological and ethnohistoric data, however, tend to blur these sharp lines between the fort and the village as artifacts, pollen, and other data reveal a more complex colonial milieu tied to the unique multicultural nature of the settlement and ties to indigenous and other non-Western communities. The historical archaeology of colonialism at Fort Vancouver helps the modern descendants of these people, as well as others tied to the fort, reconnect to their history and heritage and develop a dialogue regarding past and current identities.

British Forts in Northern New York State

Numerous British fortifications were constructed in the 1750s along Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River, all on the eastern edge of the colony of New York. Many of these positions were reoccupied twenty years later during the American Revolution. The author has conducted excavations for nearly thirty years at several of these forts and encampments, seeking to understand the strategies, provisioning, foodways, and building techniques employed by British Regulars and Provincial soldiers as they fought on the American landscape. These sites include Fort William Henry, Fort Edward, Rogers Island, and Fort George, each of which helped to open up the interior of the colony of New York to further settlement.

Supporting the Fort

A series of British trading companies attempted to dominate the Gambia River beginning in the seventeenth century. In doing so, they altered the socioeconomic landscape of the region. Central to these efforts was the British fort on James Island. The river’s large amount of natural landing points tied several villages already involved in commerce located in the upper river region to the emerging Atlantic trade. However, the physical nature of the island, including limited space and no fresh water source, made it necessary for the trading companies to maintain nearby support posts. This chapter uses archaeological and documentary records to explore the extended nature of the “fort” in the Gambian context, examining the socioeconomic interactions, access to wealth, and demographic shifts tied to British commerce during the Atlantic era.

Landlords and Strangers

Drawing on historical sources and archaeological work, this chapter considers the varied communities associated with the British forts and outposts of West Africa and places them in their wider economic and cultural contexts. Beginning with founding of the first English fort in Ghana in the 1630s through the construction of the smaller proto-colonial defensive works of the nineteenth century, British trading companies established dozens of outposts of varying size and duration on the Guinea coast. Although all primarily established for trade within an expanding sphere of British commercial enterprise, the outposts and the communities with which they were associated differed in terms of their histories, the cultural interactions represented, and their component populations. Predominantly African, the diverse communities associated with these forts underscore both the ways in which the expanding Atlantic economy structured these intersections and how African social, cultural, and political traditions shaped the entanglements that unfolded.

Tracing the Fur Trade

The origins of historical archaeology in the Pacific Northwest of North America in the mid-twentieth century concentrated on the excavations of British terrestrial fur trade forts, but little synthesis and inter-site comparisons of available data has been completed. This chapter presents a comparative typological analysis of these early-nineteenth-century British and Chinese ceramic wares recovered from the Northwest Company’s Fort Okanogan (ca. 1811–1821), Fort Spokane (ca. 1810–1821), Fort George (ca. 1811–1821) and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver (ca. 1825–1860). This study helps to reveal the extent that early Victorian ideals gave precedence to the supply of British manufactured goods to these colonial outposts on the opposite side of the world and what the presence of these ceramic wares may reveal about the complex interethnic relationships and socioeconomic statuses of the occupants of these forts and the Native Americans who engaged in trade with these forts.

At the Margins of Empire

British policy in the American Colonies—leading up to the Revolutionary War—restricted colonial expansion and discouraged settlement on the frontier. When that war broke out, maintaining control of the Great Lakes region was complicated by the lack of civilian communities. At the head of the St. Lawrence River, Carleton Island functioned as a shipping depot, refugee base, and military hub between the upper posts and the cities of Montréal and Québec. Archaeological and historical evidence indicates that the active transport at Carleton Island led to a diverse population with respect to nationality, ethnicity, occupation, and socioeconomic status. By examining not just the soldiers, however, but the Carleton Island community in a broader context, a greater understanding emerges for postwar British settlement pattern in Upper Canada.

Porous Walls and Possessive Structures

This conclusion chapter arrays the contributions to the volume along a set of integrative themes that places the archaeology of forts and their communities in direct conversation with critical approaches to the archaeology of colonialism. Pezzarossi traces out the plural roles and character of British forts discussed in the contributions, as well as the manifold influences of native and African communities and knowledge, other colonial powers, and the material world on the forts and their communities. In the end, the conclusion stresses the importance of the volume’s approach to the archaeology of forts and provides additional theoretical perspectives on how (and why it is necessary) to move past static, essentialist models of British forts and their engaged communities in order to better conceptualize the messy, porous, and entangled nature of colonial encounters, particularly at, with, or around the forts that frequently set them in motion.

Enslaved Africans and the British Military at the Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts, West Indies

Brimstone Hill Fortress (1690–1854) is a British colonial era fortification located on the northwest coast of St. Kitts in the eastern Caribbean. In the eighteenth century, it became the centerpiece of island defenses. While serving as a refuge from foreign invasion, its massive construction and garrison projected military power to foreign enemies and provided domestic security from the threat of slave revolts. This chapter uses historic records and excavations at six locations to demonstrate the multiethnic dimensions and multifaceted relationships of the fort’s occupants, including British officers and enlisted men, Black militia, West India Regiments, and enslaved Africans. A primary research goal is to underscore how Brimstone Hill reflects broad patterns of British colonial hegemony that shaped the lives of African and Creole people before and after emancipation (1834).