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The Local and Global: New Street Tavern, Port Royal, Jamaica

Margaux Delaney

Potsherds, broken pipes, the stem of a drinking glass, and a single button: taken individually, these items recovered on an archaeological dig at the New Street Tavern in Port Royal, Jamaica, are unassuming, but an online gallery from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) that presents these objects is more than the sum of its parts. Whereas an eighteenth-century gallery of a museum would more likely display perfectly preserved specimens of Wedgwood china, the artifacts in the New Street Tavern exhibit are fragmented and homely, characteristic rather than exemplary. But these exact qualities provide a singular look at early modern Jamaica in the perspectives they afford on the lives of enslaved people of the island and on the global nature of the colonial Caribbean.

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Coarse earthenware fragments excavated at Port Royal

The fragments displayed in the New Street Tavern gallery firstly present different points of contact with the lives of enslaved people in Jamaica than those provided by written records. As the International Museum of Slavery writes, “The archaeological record represents peoples’ daily lives in a way that documents cannot because its creation does not depend on the presence of a literate observer. In the case of slavery, that literate observer was most often a plantation owner, an overseer, or European traveller,” all of whom had their own biases. While the New Street Tavern gallery necessarily has its own biases––it presents eleven objects or groups of like objects out of the hundreds that must have been excavated––it does enable us to bypass the specific biases of the literate white early modern observer. Only a few forced migrants may have produced written documentation of their lives that survives for us, but the earthenware pot fragments, clay pipes, and earthenware whistle included in the gallery are all the unwritten testaments of enslaved inhabitants of Jamaica. These earthenware works are not only points of connection with individuals, but also with African diasporic communities through time, as “coarse earthenwares continued to be locally produced, bought, and sold at market by the enslaved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” As the exhibit text notes, this tradition of

African-Jamaican pottery has lived on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through such figures as the potter Ma Lou and her daughter Marlene “Munchie” Rhoden. The unpretentious potsherds are thus part of “one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions on the island,” as the National Gallery of Jamaica describes African-Jamaican pottery. (Perhaps the whistle, a rare non-utilitarian earthenware artifact, was made out of clay left over from pot-making, just as the Jamaican studio potter Cecil Baugh recalled making “little bowls and other things, children’s toys” out of bits of clay in his childhood.) Thanks to the archaeological record, early modern enslaved inhabitants of Jamaica emerge as artists in this tradition and medium in their own right.

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A bowl by Ma Lou in the collection of the Museums of History and Ethnography, Institute of Jamaica

 

In the DAACS gallery, New Street Tavern also becomes a hyper-localized case study of early modern globalization in action. The items presented in the gallery include a teapot finial, indicating the consumption of tea, a product of East Asia; multiple pipes, indicating the consumption of tobacco, a product of North America; and a porcelain saucer manufactured in China. A commodity history sourcing the copper alloy and gilt of the Royal Navy button might bring us to other parts of the globe. The archaeological excavation thus shows us the ways that these global commodities met in mundane confluence in this urban tavern. The gallery also allows us to flip the script of Eurocentric center-and-periphery studies of consumption: the sugar that was certainly consumed with the tea, as well as the rum surely drunk from glasses much like the one whose broken stem appears in the exhibit, were, in this case, local rather than global products. In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney Mintz reflects on his time doing fieldwork in a rural, sugar-producing region of Puerto Rico, where he saw workers both chewing on the freshly cut sugar cane and taking their coffee with refined sugar. “Though both the juice of the cane and the granular sugars were sweet,” he writes, “they seemed otherwise unrelated” (xix). What Mintz experienced were the levels of abstraction that separate cane juice from sugar’s globalized, commoditized form. The New Street Tavern gallery inspires similar reflections about the lived experience of locally produced global commodities. Even if it was a product of Jamaica, sugar is, in the end, more comparable to the other global commodities used and consumed in the tavern than to the locally created and traded earthenware pottery.

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A fragment of a Chinese porcelain saucer excavated at Port Royal

 

The exhibit falls short in one respect: with only eleven objects or sets of objects included in the gallery, it has hardly finished telling the story of New Street Tavern. But it does serve as a valuable entry point into early modern Jamaica, providing the viewer with a richer understanding of the creative lives of the enslaved people and the globalized lives of the inhabitants of Port Royal.

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