Join us Tuesday, June 27, from 4-5 p.m. ET for a hybrid Fellow’s Forum with Elizabeth Clay, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University.
Attend in person: Berkeley Conference Room, the Jefferson Library
Preregistration is not required to attend via zoom, link will become active June 27th.
Join via ZOOM »
About the Presentation
Colonial chroniclers characterized plantation slavery in French Guiana (Guyane) as consistently lacking in funds and labor. The production of clove, however, was one celebrated area of commerce. Habitation La Caroline exemplifies this period of the nineteenth-century economy through both its durable infrastructures and the variety of material culture recovered via three seasons of excavation at the household level. During my ICJS/DAACS fellowship, I have studied and cataloged a portion of artifacts from the La Caroline plantation in an attempt to better understand French material culture, local ceramic industries, and the extent to which French enslavers and enslaved Africans in Guyane participated in Atlantic trade networks. In this talk, I will situate La Caroline within its historical context and outline current and future research questions made possible through close material culture analysis and the comparative information offered by the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.
About Elizabeth Clay
Elizabeth Clay is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century French colonialism and plantation slavery in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean and the cultural heritage of enslavement. Her dissertation, Slavery and Freedom on the Fringes of France: Historical Archaeology at Habitation La Caroline, French Guiana, explored the material legacies of nineteenth-century spice production via the first archaeological excavation of a plantation village for the enslaved in this former colony and present-day overseas department of France.