Newton Slave Burial Ground is an industrial heritage site and informal cemetery in Barbados. It was used by people enslaved at the adjacent Newton Plantation. [1] [2] [3] [4] The site has been owned by the Barbados Museum & Historical Society since 1993. [1] It has been subject to excavations since the 1970s, [5] [4] [3] [2] which have produced information regarding slave lifeways including resistance, [4] [6] [7] health, [3] [4] and culture. [3] [4] [8] [9]
Officially colonized by the British in 1627, [4] Barbados was by the end of the seventeenth century the richest possession of Britain's Caribbean empire. [4] The Bajan economy was driven by, and dependent on, slave labor, [4] [3] [2] which played out on cash-crop plantations throughout the island. [4] [2] One such site was the Newton Plantation, roughly 9.2 km (5.7 mi) east of the port of Bridgetown in the parish of Christ Church. [10] The adjacent Newton Slave Burial Ground became the final resting place of over 570 African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Bajan persons enslaved there from c. 1670-1833. [2] [10] Established by Derbyshire native Samuel Newton in the 1660s, [10] [11] the plantation grew sugarcane and produced rum and molasses, [12] [10] and its height of production coincided with Barbados' prominence in the British empirical economy during the seventeenth century. [10] The plantation held slaves at least as recently as 1828, [13] six years before slavery was abolished on the island in 1834.
Until the last quarter of the 17th century, the Newton Plantation was a major source of Maroon communities on the island. [4] Increasingly draconian preventative tactics were implemented at the site to dissuade potential escapees, including slaves being branded with an "N" to indicate their status as property of the Newton Plantation. [6] Slaves continued to escape in spite of these measures, [6] settling in Barbados and acquiring fraudulent documents attesting to their freedom or escaping the island completely. [6] Barbados was subject to such an extreme influx of slaves, [7] though, that the plantation's authority did not always invest in pursuing escapees, and even manumitted elderly slaves no longer able to work in the cane fields. [6] Indeed, people of African descent made up three-quarters of the island's population by 1700, [7] and enslaved Black Africans made up between 70 and 90 percent of migration to the island between 1670 and 1720. [7]
The site was initially excavated in the 1970s by American archaeologists Drs. Jerome Handler and Frederick Lange, who worked to elucidate colonial-era slave lifeways on Barbados. [5] The Barbados Museum and Historical Society presides over the site's preservation. [10]
Osteology has shed light on the quality of slave life and their cultural lifeways at the plantation. Examination of skeletal remains at the Newton burial ground suggests a life expectancy of 29 years, a figure in conflict with historical records indicating a life expectancy of 20 years. [3] Despite the slightly longer lifespan, skeletal remains also yields evidence of periodic starvation among Newton's slave population. [3] Moreover, osteological analysis suggests a low infant mortality rate, again in contrast with a historical demography that reports high rates of death among infants. [3] Tooth analysis indicates slaves regularly smoked tobacco and exhibited incisor mutilations, [3] the latter of which may have been a performative practice retained from the African continent or adopted by indigenous Caribbeans. [8] Human remains at Newton were buried in a deliberate, non-arbitrary manner, possibly indicating the maintenance of systems of kinship among the site's slaves. [3]
Dated to the late 17th or early 18th centuries, archaeologists have been intrigued by the remains of a young adult woman enslaved at the site. [9] The circumstances of her burial are abnormal, as she was interned in the largest artificial mound at the site without a coffin or other grave goods. [9] Osteological analysis detected extremely high levels of lead in her body, which may have contributed to her death as she appears to have been otherwise healthy. [9] The positioning of her body, too, is inconsistent with the rest of the remains at the burial ground, being the only person positioned face-down. [9] This is characteristic of West African mortuary practices, [9] and suggests that the slaves at Newton retained and maintained Indigenous cultural practices at the site. [4] [3] [9]