Since the turn of the twenty-first century, considerations of plantation social, financial, manufacturing, and environmental ecosystems have been the focus of growing scholarly critique, attracting geographers, linguists, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. While the plantation system was ultimately a cog in the globalized juggernaut economic enterprise devised to feed Europe’s obsessive lust for sugar, for those living and working on the plantation, often against their will, the plantation as a form represented a socio-cultural landscape affected at every level by colonial logic, imperial preoccupations with racial segregation and the cognitive landscapes of bondage (Whitley 2008).
The panoptic plantation model has become a valuable method by which to measure the archaeological evidence of plantation visibility, surveillance and control networks, further developing Foucault’s Panoptic theories of the “power of mind over mind” (1977, p. 206). However, the panoptic model, while a potentially useful theoretical schema to consider some aspects of the narrative visualscapes created by extended colonial logics that constructed plantationscapes in the Caribbean and the impact of colonial consciousness on hegemonic social structures and environments, is also potentially problematic in many ways.
Plantation Control and Resistance
Control and resistance within the Caribbean-Anglophone plantation ‘totality’ have long been areas of interest for those studying plantation systems. As Frederick Cooper noted, control “was not simply a matter of physical repression” (Cooper, 1979, p. 119). Studies of slavery, postslavery, and black dispossession have long acknowledged that the built landscapes of plantations were designed and enacted to sustain sociopolitical and ideological messaging, becoming intimately connected to the overarching power constructs that reinforced colonial dominance (Delle, 1998; Epperson, 2000). Surveillance on the plantation soon became “both a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority and a means for the mediation of those subject to that authority” (Mirzoeff, 2011, p. xv). For archaeologists, plantation landscapes, first and foremost a machine for producing commodity crop, therefore, become tools by which to examine the physical and environmental evidence of control, of which subliminal messaging designed by and aimed at those inhabiting the plantation became a primary means to achieve that goal.
For many studying Caribbean plantations, visibility has become a practical approach to achieve these aims by considering the organization of built and natural environments to exploit lines-of-sight and create spatial configurations that practically reinforced surveillance, control and European supremacy over enslaved populations (Delle, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2014; Epperson, 2000; Randle, 2011; Bates, 2015; Davis, 2016). One of the more famous theories developed to understand these socio-cultural landscapes is the Panoptic plantation, based initially on the works of Sir Samuel and Jeremy Bentham, later reenvisioned by Michel Foucault (1977). The panoptic plantation model argues that by positioning strategic buildings, such as the Overseer’s and Great House, in tactical positions, planters, managers, and overseers could monitor enslaved laborers, maintaining the threat of scrutiny, thus forcing enslaved individuals to self-police, ultimately participating, in their domination (Upton, 1984; Delle, 1999, 2002; Epperson, 2000; Randle, 2011; Wilson Marshall, 2022).
The plantation was a total institution that acted to oversee and dominate the bounded experience of those individuals “cut off from the wider society” on the plantation (Goffman, 1961, p. xiii; Smith, 1967). Within the ‘totality’ of the plantation system, an institution firmly focused upon production and manufacture, the socially embedded means employed to protect and facilitate these economic systems ultimately acted to condition everyday life for those living within its borders. This enclaving of plantation society, accompanied by a system of physical violence and structuralized surveillance, enabled overtly authoritarian authority and the formation of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) utimatlely constructing and supporting the formation of unyielding, stratified social structures (Smith, 1967; Genovese, 2011; Raj, 2022). The plantation, therefore, represents more than a simple collection of buildings and fields but instead acts as a group of “spatialities” whereby geographies of power and resistance were purposefully designed and enacted to reinforce surveillance and sociopolitical ideological messaging (Delle, 1998; Epperson, 2000; Richards-Rissetto, 2017).
With the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), quantifiable assessment of visibility on Caribbean plantations has allowed Historic Archaeologists and Geographers to employ line of sight, viewshed, and intervisibility analyses to investigate plantation spatial organization in relation to the panopticon. Colonial powers employed visibility and cultivated social hegemonies via carefully crafted coded visual messages designed to influence and shape (or control) individual and group behaviors, particularly those levied against enslaved populations (Singleton, 2001; Delle, 2011; Randle, 2011; e.g., Bates, 2015). Visibility analysis, however, is complex and requires consideration of several not-always-rectifiable issues and factors, and often necessitates the use of unavailable forms of data, nor is it possible to visualize with the available tools (Wheatley and Gillings, 2000; Ogburn, 2006).
In particular, previous explorations of Caribbean panoptic plantations have been limited by the available data and technologies. Most (if not all) of the preceding studies have completed visibility analysis on digital scenes devoid of structures, agricultural vegetation, and other natural environmental features, termed here ‘barren’ landscapes. Digital archaeology literature has demonstrated the importance of vegetation in visibility studies (Hernández et al., 2003; Llobera, 2007), and the Caribbean plantationscape is no different. Vegetation should arguably be a central focus in the study of Caribbean plantations due to the vast seasonal disparities in the growth patterns of its primary crop, sugarcane.
A native of temperate and tropical New Guinea, the perennial grass species Saccharum officinarum (S. officinarum) represents the earliest identified variety of sugarcane, where it has been grown since its domestication in circa 4,000 BC. Though now virtually extinct, S. officinarum, commonly called ‘Native’ or ‘Creole’ cane, was transported to the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, where it was cultivated intensively by European colonial powers in the Caribbean and tropical Americas (Mintz, 1986; Sheridan, 1994; Benitez-Rojo, 1996; Dunn, 2000; Smith, 2015). Before the late eighteenth century, Saccharum officinarum was the only known type of sugarcane (Sheridan, 1994; Lloyd Evans and Joshi, 2020) and became a foundation upon which the Early Modern World was built.
The impact of sugarcane on West Indian landscapes has long been an area of curiosity for researchers focusing on large-scale cultivation and production methods, financial systems and socio-politics, and environmental impacts such as mass deforestation and water use (e.g., irrigation). However, the visual impact of cane and its effect on Caribbean plantation socio-politics is, to date, a relatively understudied area with great potential for further understanding “cognitive landscapes of bondage” (Whitley, 2008).The cane growing season was long, lasting from between fourteen to eighteen months (Menard, 2006). However, during this time, the height at which sugarcane could grow fluctuated enormously from two to six meters (six to twenty feet). The impact of this height variation cannot be underestimated and would have dramatic, tangible, seasonal effects on lines of visibility and plantation surveillance, targeted sociopolitical and ideological messaging, potentially reducing the efficacy of European domination tactics and diminishing the value of plantation estates and buildings as tools of controlled environments.
The Caribbean is an exemplar of how drastically smaller demographic factions attempted to dominate much larger populations. Far more subtle and intricate social negotiations became vital methods for European planters to maintain contro and dominate enslaved laborers on the plantation. Visibility and surveillance are often considered a primary colonial method of domination within the controlled environments of the Caribbean and North America (Andrzejewski, 2008).
While the panopticon concept was originally devised as factory design reform by Sir Samuel Bentham (Werrett, 1999; Steadman, 2012). From the nineteenth century, the Panopticon gained particular fame when Jeremy Bentham adapted his brother Samuel’s original design to create a new penitentiary system. Jeremy Bentham hypothesized an ‘Inspection House,’ a prison constructed to utilize surveillance to attain “power of mind over mind” (Bentham, 1843, p. 39). Bentham’s panopticon model comprises a circular building with a central inspection tower and barred, not walled, cells organized within the outer wall. The panoptic prison model amplified the visual abilities of those within the central tower structure, constituting a dominant surveillance location from which an unseen commissioner or guard could view the inmates in their cell homes, limiting their knowledge of when or if correctional officers could see them (Epperson, 2000). The panopticon, therefore, wields the potential of constant surveillance as a weapon. Surveillance in this manner exercises a consistent, unidentifiable, and intuitive sense of being watched, causing inmates to police their own behaviors. The concept of persistent, domineering, Big Brother-esque surveillance is undoubtedly disturbing. However, Bentham argued for the panoptic inspection concept’s manifold advantages: “Morals reformed-health preserved-industry invigorated-instruction diffused-public burthens lightened-Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock-the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied-all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (Bentham, 1843, p. 39).
Bentham’s panopticon became a widespread symbol of discplinary power as it emerged in modern Europe and was exported to the colonies when further redeveloped by Michel Foucault (1977). In his seminal work Discipline and Punish, Foucault famously examined how panoptic visibility acted as a medium for surveillance and control. Foucault described the many ways that mere threats of surveillance acted as mental programming that compelled inmates to obey the specific, designated behavioral standards demanded by their captors, ultimately becoming “the principle of his own subjection” (1977, pp. 202–203).
Various archaeological studies have utilized Foucault’s panoptic approach to demonstrate how surveillance and control on plantations in the Americas resulted in a “geography of power.” The Panoptic Plantation model demonstrated the ways that planters, engaging with the colonial logic of the time, would actively manipulate constructed space and plantation landscapes to enhance lines-of-sight and surveillance to underpin social divisions, boundaries, racial inequality, and amplify elite, racial power structures (Upton, 1984; Delle, 1999, 2002; Epperson, 1999, 2000; Singleton, 2001; Randle, 2011).
The globalizing world of the Early Modern period, particularly the colonial Caribbean, was a geographic, socio-political system aimed at organizing, dominating, and profiting from newly ‘discovered,’ unruly lands of the periphery. In doing so, imperial Anglophone systems in the Caribbean embedded racial condemnation and difference, normalizing segregation, classification, violence, and control within a differential practice that fortified the planter system as the ‘standard’ way of life (McKittrick, 2013). In this context, the panoptic plantation model considers how the assembly or arrangement of sugar estate buildings, particularly that of the Great House, Overseer’s residence, and enslaved village, were employed to transmit socio-political messages reinforcing the dominant logic. In simple terms, the panoptic plantation became a descriptive model demonstrating methods of total surveillance whereby occupants were constantly in danger of being observed from particular central structures and punished for any behavior that violated the “spirit of colonial order and discipline” (Brown, 2008, p. 4).
GIS and digital approaches to power and space
Attempts to understand connections between physical space and plantation power systems have generally been numerous and effective, especially when considering the material evidence of social negotiations between groups. Various projects have demonstrated the conscious and unconscious impact of power configurations and social hierarchies on those conceiving and erecting built structures, settlements, and adapted landscapes (Moore, 1992; Nieves Zedeno, 2008; Johnson, 2012; Bernardini et al., 2013; Murakami, 2014; Ylimaunu et al., 2014; Drageset, 2017; Williams, 2017). However, using geospatial analyses such as GIS to quantify these complex and often subtle social negotiations and power dynamics can be particularly challenging and potentially limited in action (Wheatley and Gillings, 2000; Conolly and Lake, 2006).
Archaeologists were among the first to embrace Geographic Information Systems (GIS), leveraging geospatial technologies in archaeological research from as early as the 1980s. While older software iterations could be operationally tricky, GIS mapping naturally fits within a field dedicated to investigating tangible and intangible spatial remnants. As digital mapping tools have developed and become more powerful, GIS has advanced to fill the needs of original approaches like cognitive archaeology, or the “archaeology of [the] mind” (Renfrew, 2008, p. 1026). GIS has since become a primary method by which many archaeological studies have completed large-scale quantitative analyses of historic landscapes.
In previous decades, archaeological conceptual thought, specifically those situated within the Processual movement, considered only tangible, quantifiable variables related to space (defined by Tilley (1994) as the medium for action), often neglecting the basic underlying cultural semantics expressed within landscape change (Hudson and Milisauskas, 2018). Landscapes are not merely physical entities. They are formed and defined by a myriad of communally understood and remembered connections, interactions, and relations that form a distinct cultural product from which meaning is derived (Weiner, 1991; Pruitt, 2022). Digital landscape studies often draw from various subdisciplines of archaeology, such as cognitive and experiential archaeologies, to consider historic landscapes as artifacts influenced by nature and human society and, ultimately, to allow a deeper understanding of peoples’ perceptions, experiences, and embodied meaning within different environments. GIS has become a meaningful tool for unraveling and following environmental, economic, sociopolitical, and cognitive components within landscape spaces (Renfrew, 2008; Abramiuk, 2024; Müller, 2024).
The Production of Space within the ‘spatial turn’ presents space as not only a physical entity but also an intricate social construction. The spatial outcome therefore, in addition to tangible entities such as topography or vegetation, additionally consists of individual and group socially imbued values and meanings. Lefebvre's (1991) “spatial triad” defines how space is fashioned within societies and comprises the interactions between “spatial practice” (perceived space), “representations of space” (conceived space), and “representational spaces” (lived space) (Crang, 1999; Watkins, 2005; Carp, 2008; Schmid, 2008; Ng et al., 2010; Butler, 2012; Merrifield, 2013; Wilson, 2013; Rutanen, 2014; Yunzhong, 2022). These heuristic differentiations have resulted in an archaeological interest in phenomenological experiences of landscapes, that is, understanding space and place by considering the lived perspective, as well as physical, and sensory experiences (Sauer, 1925; Lefebvre, 1991).
Vision And Visibility in GIS
The digital applications of vision and visibility as an investigative technique for interpreting landscape changes and/or multi-sensory experiences have attracted attention from various international disciplines such as art history (e.g., Pollock, 1988), geography (e.g., Cosgrove, 2012), computer studies (e.g., Bittner and Wonka, 2003), and engineering (e.g., Wagen and Rizk, 2003) amongst others. In archaeology, visibility and vision studies are often situated within cognitive archaeology, utilizing environmental semiotics and theoretical praxis as narrative and framing devices to consider the connection between corporeal experience and perception (Wheatley and Gillings, 2000; Renfrew, 2008; Preucel, 2010). Many archaeological projects examining past visibility and intervisibility have focused on prehistoric monumental architecture, considering their prominence on the landscape (Llobera, 2003; Podobnikar, 2012; Bernardini et al., 2013), signaling (Wheatley, 1995; Kantner and Hobgood, 2003), landmark recognition (Gillings, 2009; Eve and Crema, 2014), cosmological significance (Sofaer, 2007), and uses for demonstrating power and authority in order to manipulate sociopolitical structures (Fewkes, 1917; Van Dyke, 2008; Bongers, Arkush and Harrower, 2012; Doyle, Garrison and Houston, 2012; Bernardini et al., 2013; Bernardini and Peeples, 2015). Planation-based GIS analysis generating visibility network data has become an effective analysis method for plantation studies considering the impact of structures and landscapes on landscapes of power (Delle, 1999, 2002; Epperson, 2000; Randle, 2011; Davis, 2016; Armstrong, 2019). However, given the lack of data on historic vegetation, most visibility studies predominantly focus on methodological studies demonstrating practical approaches to sight, sightlines, and relative distance between structures and environmental features or use social theory to consider the social nature of cognitive perception. Very little work in plantation studies engages both areas and historic vegetation within an empirical method-based phenomenological archaeology (Tilley 2004; 2008). This data-based and conceptual partition has ultimately resulted in a superficial understanding of the contextualized critical dynamics of plantations (DeMarrais, Gosden, and Renfrew 2004; Tilley 2007; Back Danielsson 2010).
GIS visibility analysis utilizes a digital elevation model (DEM) or digital terrain model (DTM), a gridded, bare-earth digital illustration of the local terrain to generate Lines of Sight (LoS) between a selected observer point and each cell on the DEM. Within the viewshed analysis, each cell within the DEM grid is considered visible unless the local topography breaks the sightline. This primary type of ‘binary’ viewshed analysis, therefore, creates a visualization of quantified landscape visibility where each cell will either register as ‘0’- meaning it is seen by none of the observer locations, to ‘1’- meaning it is visible from the observer point (Wheatley and Gillings, 2000; Nutsford et al., 2015). While there are several issues in using line-of-sight analysis (for more on the issues, see Wheatley and Gillings, 2000), this approach has helped to create a more detailed preliminary understanding of visibility on plantations. Line of sight and viewsheds can, therefore, depict intervisibility networks on barren digital plantation landscapes by considering variations in elevation; it cannot, however, consider the impact of buildings or vegetation on the line of sight around the estate.
While much of the primordial forest that swathed Caribbean islands was razed early in their colonization by Europeans to produce exposed areas used to cultivate sugar intensively, sugarcane could grow as high as six meters (twenty feet), radically altering the landscape and visibility lines on and between estates. The absence of research investigating the impact of structures and vegetation on historic landscapes is due to two main issues: the limitations of digital approaches such as GIS to include vegetation data and the general absence of historical and archaeological evidence demonstrating the types and general height of vegetation in existence at the time. The integration of vegetation into studies of historic visibility networks has, for various reasons, been somewhat elusive to date. Incorporating vegetation within intervisibility computations demands suitable data, and algorithmic alterations are often required to incorporate said data. However, recent studies have, in more significant numbers and detail, developed powerful computation models and programming routines ranging from the decidedly complex (Llobera, 2007) to far more simplified but still effective versions for vegetation line-of-sight analyses (Hernández et al., 2003). Recent works developing digital surface models (DSMs), which include objects such as structures, environmental features, and vegetation, have provided excellent results, creating new, composite digital landscape maps showing altered visibility networks.
Plantation Viewsheds
Since the 1990s, archaeological studies of Caribbean plantationism have redirected away from Eurocentric studies of social elites towards more multiethnic and varied studies of cultural developments as part of a larger interest in studies of slavery, postslavery, and black dispossession to consider the quotidian socio-political experiences of marginalized, othered peoples and the ongoing social, religious, and psychological violence habitually targeted against enslaved Africans on plantations (Upton, 1984; Wilson Marshall, 2022). Numerous archaeological studies have considered the impact of landscape on enslaved communities in the Caribbean and North America, examining links between plantation estate layout, road structure, and building construction with painful histories experienced by those enslaved (Upton, 1984; Epperson, 1999; Singleton, 2001; Menard, 2006; Whitley, 2008; Randle, 2011; Delle, 2014; Bates, 2015; e.g., Bassett, 2017, 2022; Wilson Marshall, 2022)
While many early plantation studies have examined either a singular sociological facet of the plantation or considered them a unified entity, the study of “cognitive landscapes of bondage” seeks to combine varying conceptual approaches to assess the phenomenological and cognitive experiences of those enslaved within landscapes. Plantations represent more than just whiteness housed within “singular unified spaces” (Upton, 1984; Wilson Marshall, 2022, p. 1). Instead, plantations were bounded places embodying complex patterns of socio-cultural variables and containing both white and black socio-cultural and physical landscapes constructed for and felt differently by separate actors (Upton, 1984; Whitley, 2008; Wilson Marshall, 2022). Plantation cognitive landscapes were, therefore, the result of deliberate creation and cognitive decision-making influenced by colonial logic, “culturally learned, socially sanctioned, and physically indicated [within] the minds of their experiencers” (Hudson and Milisauskas, 2018, p. 214; Hudson, Kruk and Milisauskas, 2020)
Various studies have demonstrated cognitive decision-making and the deliberate use of constructed space to emphasize visual communication and reinforce white supremacy over Black laborers. The means by which core cultural semantics and spatial arrangement affected various audiences is still under study; however, using localized archaeological and environmental datasets, research has demonstrated patterns representing the impact of visibility and invisibility utilizing the manipulation of spatial layout. In the Caribbean, digital plantation studies by Historical Archaeologists have employed visibility to attempt empirical analysis of the panopticon paradigm to investigate plantation spatial organization and the cultivation of social control, generally against enslaved populations to clarify how Europeans enforced racial power dynamics. Using the panoptic approach, Dell Upton (1984) established the visual prominence of the location held by the estate’s Great House. The planters’ dwelling, Upton stated, would inhabit the highest position away from any adjoining structures and local geography. This prominent position would allow the Great House to be viewed distinctly and conspicuously from afar.
Throughout several publications (1998, 1999, 2002, 2011), James Delle considered lines-of-sight and methods of aural messaging between planter estates as a means of communication to apply control over large areas. Delle argued that visual control was exerted not only over the enslaved population on the plantation, using the overseer’s residence as a dominant feature within the plantation surveillance network- as with Bentham’s panoptic guard tower- but also to publicize planters’ social standing (desired or tangible) to their white neighbors. In 2002, James Delle used material culture studies to examine the internal organization of two case study plantation sites to demonstrate the use of built structure and manipulated landscapes within a ‘sociospatial web’ of social negotiation calculated to reinforce substructures of control. Delle employed a GIS-based viewshed model to analyze the visible areas from a center point, in this case, the great house occupied by the planter. Within this research, Delle established two significant themes within plantation spatial configurations and the cultivation of social control: first, the centralized location of the overseer’s residence, arguing that the structure functioned as a dominant hub for surveillance, similar to Bentham’s guard tower. Secondly, Delle’s viewsheds showed a direct intervisibility between all of the seven studied great houses, with each (except for one outlier) being able to view, on average, three to five other plantation houses at any one time. Delle argued that this prominent visual and potentially aural connection between planter estates created a robust communication network by which planters could forewarn one another of unrest and exercise their domination.
Terrence Epperson (2000) applied panoptic theory to demonstrate how Thomas Jefferson and George Mason intentionally designed the structures and gardens of the Gunston Hall and Monticello plantations in Virginia to guarantee that enslaved laborers would feel “The Eye Of Power,” the concentrated, watchful gaze of their enslavers while also concurrently rendering them unseen to Mason and Jefferson themselves (Foucault, 1980; Epperson, 2000). In doing so, Epperson drew on Rajchman’s theories of “spaces of constructed visibility,” considering “how spaces were designed to make things seeable, and seeable in a specific way” (Rajchman, 1988, p. 103), to further examine how “spaces of constructed invisibility” were employed to “mask the less idyllic aspects of plantation life from view” (Epperson, 2000, p. 64). Epperson ultimately determined that the structural arrangement and configuration of the Gunston Hall and Monticello estates, rather than reflecting a system of psycho-social control, instead replicated John Locke’s political philosophies and were fabricated to reinforce ‘possessive individualism’ and worker erasure (Laslett, 1960; Macpherson, 1962; Epperson, 2000). In Cuba, Theresa Singleton (2001) described spatial dialectics enacted between the planters’ domination of plantation spaces and opposition from the enslaved community, demonstrating the increased visibility afforded by building a rooftop balcony on European residences. The creation of such structures, Singleton argued, allowed white planters and overseers improved visibility of the enslaved village and surrounding estate.
Thomas G. Whitley again leveraged GIS as a reconstructive-analytical and cognitive-interpretive tool to consider plantation visibility on three plantations in Georgia, USA to examine the “integral relationship between space, labor control, risk management, and social identity” (2008, p. 27). Using a human perspective focused on “building an independent framework which represented the cognitive perspective of the people who actually deposited the archaeological material”. Whitley’s analysis employed various mapping tools to conceptualise space as it would have been experienced by enslaved labourers on the plantation, “how their ideas and behavior were influenced by how they envisioned their environment to be, and how those ideas and behaviors changed over time” (Whitley, 2008, p. 9). In doing so, Whitley was able to categorize particular plantation spaces where increased surveillance and coerced labor would have occurred, such as fields, classifying them as fundamentally harmful spaces, and apportioning them with negative cognitive values within the digitzation. In collating these quantified perceptions, Whitley considered potential connections between overseer control, surveillance and enslaved perception of space and risk management when considering how to escape bondage on the plantations.
Randle (2011) used a cumulative viewshed analysis (CVA) approach to demonstrate how the arrangement of plantations along the Cooper River substantiates Delle’s great house intervisibility hypothesis. However, in using the CVA approach, i.e., multiple observer points, Randle’s results called theories of the panoptic plantation into question as their analysis provided reduced data reinforcing the surveillance of enslaved settlements.
Study Area
The Betty’s Hope Plantation was one of four sugar estates owned by the Codrington family in St Peter Parish on the Leeward Island of Antigua. Established in 1651, Betty’s Hope (see Fig 1) developed into the island’s primary sugar plantation and a technological and methodological forerunner, providing a prototype and testbed for new social and manufacturing approaches (Goudge, 2019; Fox, 2020). These socioeconomic characteristics make Betty’s Hope a prime exemplar of the colonial British-held Caribbean’s shifting social and productive environments during the Early Modern Period (Goudge, 2020).
Due to the nature of their over 150 years of absentee ownership, vast record collections document the daily running of the Codrington estates. These documents, now held in Antigua and Barbuda’s National Archives, consist of bookkeeping ledgers, logbooks, and correspondence between the Codringtons and the estate managers in Antigua describing all, from lists of the enslaved and their trades on the plantations to export and import records and discussions of family probate. Also included within these records were several maps digitized by Professor Georgia Fox, formerly of California State University, Chico. These estate charts, dating from 1710 and 1755, depict each of the Codrington estates; the Cotton Old Works, Cotton New Works, Betty’s Hope, and Garden plantations, in great detail, marking the locations of not only the original structures, the great houses, production buildings, and overseers’ houses, but also the location of the enslaved villages connected to each estate. While carrying with them an intrinsic European bias, these maps have been helpful in many ways, particularly for this project, as they detail the layout and contents of the field systems in use during the periods depicted. The 1710 map, while encompassing details identifying each structure, depicts a stylized illustration of each estate, portraying local built and agricultural environments without much distance or scale precision for the elements represented. In contrast, the 1755 map drawn by the surveyor Samuel Clapham appears to follow Higman’s assessment of other estate maps from the period whereby “a premium was placed on the accuracy of representation and measurement, and a low value on decorative qualities” (1987, p. 18).
When considering slavery, space, and social control on plantations, the implications of relatively accurate, detailed cartographic representations are clear. Delle noted that “the design of many plantations was executed in such a way as physically to embody the structures of inequality, to create a geography of power” (2002, p. 342). The existence of the 1755 Clapham map generates numerous opportunities to leverage digital archaeology to understand how the physical and agricultural structures of estates exemplified control and colonial dominance and how diverse actors experienced divergent white and Black landscapes that existed within unified plantation spaces.