September 2008 Newsletter Constructing Class and Community: Shifting Meanings in the Built Environment at Polly Hill Plantation, Bahamas

The Historical Archaeology of the Built Environment Historical archaeology is an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, which combines excavated materials with documents and often extant landscapes to interpret the more recent past (Yamin and Metheny 1996). Archaeological studies of the built environment are plentiful, and have been used to understand complex dimensions of social life in the past including class enslaved and emancipated Africans and their descendants also have relied heavily on evidence from architectural design and landscape construction to understand the internal and external dynamics of plantation and post-plantation life ways Archaeologists working in the Bahamas during the historic period are fortunate to have access to standing or partially-extant structural remains that date to different periods of the help us to reconstruct the landscapes that shaped people's everyday lives. These landscapes were in one sense a reflection of function, or how a space was developed to facilitate certain types of daily tasks and behaviors (Rapoport 1990). These landscapes also were symbolic, designed to shape and reflect certain elements of the social order (McGuire 1991). The site of Polly Hill Plantation on the island of San Salvador has several extant structures that date to the original Loyalist settlement of the island in the late eighteenth century. There is also evidence that these buildings were augmented and reused by the enslaved