Slavery And Freedom On The Fringes Of France: Historical Archaeology At Habitation La Caroline, French Guiana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the slavery and post-emancipation periods in French Guiana using archival, geospatial, and archaeological data from a nineteenth-century spice plantation in combination with an ethnographic exploration of the cultural heritage of slavery. Information from a variety of archival sources reveal the myths that French administrators created and perpetuated to encourage settlement in what was generally understood to be a “failed” colonial space. An analysis of LiDAR reveals highly organized plantation landscapes that embedded colonial power in the landscape. An initial artifact study at the household level reveals that enslaved people relied on a variety of imported material culture in their daily lives. I argue that the landscapes of spice production were more significant than previously acknowledged and that enslaved people were active participants in colonial networks. As the first archaeological investigation of a plantation slave quarter in French Guiana, this dissertation considers slavery from a non-island, non-sugar dominant colony to counter the more well-studied plantations in the Caribbean. The excavation provides baseline information for a new region using methods that have become well-established within African Diaspora archaeology, yet it challenges the convention that plantation landscapes are directly correlated with the commodities being produced for export to instead claim that spice plantation landscapes functioned to express French colonial ideologies. Because the lack of basic information about slavery heavily influences contemporary discourse, the project includes essential public components that support the broader project of reparative scholarship. Community-engaged site visits furthermore contribute to Afro-diasporic heritage tourism that directly confronts colonial legacies by centering the histories, spaces, and materiality of enslavement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".