by Josie Gill
We started the day with the usual round of introductions and everyone was encouraged to share how they were feeling about being part of the project. I was initially alarmed to hear that in addition to feeling ‘nervous’ and ‘anxious’, some people felt ‘apprehensive’ about the project, in particular around how we would work together and whether we would be able to speak to each other in a shared language. I think it soon became apparent that these feelings were only to be expected, in fact, it might have been troubling if people hadn’t felt this way: none of us have worked on a project like this before, bringing academic, scientists and creative writers together in this way, and none of us really knew what to expect. However another common word in people’s opening reflections was ‘excitement’ and we were all equally as curious about the themes, ideas and interactions to come. In my opening presentation I discussed, amongst other things, that nature of interdisciplinary work, and pointed out that while we all feel we know what it is, how we do interdisciplinary work is less clear! In this sense we have a certain freedom in this project, to create a way of working together across disciplines and inside/outside of universities, collectively and collaboratively. We discussed how we might go about working together and it was felt that dialogue, imagination and an emphasis on our shared humanity was a good place to start!
The first case study that Emma and Catriona presented was the Newton Plantation in Barbados. From bodies in the slave cemetery there we can tell what the slaves were eating (mainly sorghum and salt fish) but the isotopes in their bones can also tell us whether they were born on the island or were brought from Africa. The osteology revealed how hard the slaves were made to work and how malnutrition and stress affected their physical development. One individual’s molars had marked hypercementosis– a kind of inflammation of the roots - a sign that they were severely malnourished - but the teeth also showed they had gone through periods of better nutrition where the body had tried to heal itself. Because we cannot know when the individuals died (carbon dating is not accurate enough to distinguish between a couple of hundred years) we don’t know whether their experiences were contemporaneous, and this got me thinking about the nature of time when we think about the history of slavery. Beginning with bodies as a means to access the past, as we did yesterday, revealed that we must take a different approach from traditional, more linear accounts of history: the layers of graves in the cemetery represent experiences in time which cannot be ordered linearly, and this reminded me of the way in which many writers of neo-slave narratives have employed postmodern techniques which explore slave experiences in non-linear ways which often link to the present.
After a relaxing lunch during which we discussed the relative merits of the new BBC drama Undercover, we came back to consider the second case study, Finca Clavijo, which Emma has been working on. Many of us were not aware that slavery existed in Gran Canaria, and it was fascinating to hear about the role it played in the slave trades of various countries and about the Spanish sugar plantations which were established from the mid-15th Century onwards. The slave cemetery in this case, which would have been adjacent to a sugar plantation, was discovered whilst building work was going on. It is unusual as it is both a multi-ethnic cemetery with evidence of both Christian and Muslim burial practices. It is possible to tell this from the angles and orientation of the bodies, as well as items they were buried with (in one case a Christian medal was found with an individual). But Catriona also pointed out that we should keep in mind that such practices could reflect the beliefs of the people who buried the bodies, rather than the individuals themselves. This got me thinking about the fact that, in a way, we might consider stories about these bodies to have begun almost as soon the people died. We can’t know whether how they were buried tells us about the social organisation of the time, the beliefs of the people they lived with or their own beliefs.
In the final session of the day we broke into groups for discussions guided by a set of questions such as - What are the similarities between what writers and archaeologists do? Should archaeologists correct factual errors in fictional accounts? What gaps are there in our knowledge about the lives of the enslaved that we can address together? Cedar suggested that what unites archaeologists and writers is their shared nosiness, their interest in the lives of others, their digging around to for information and inspiration. Others spoke of the gaps and spaces that research can’t reach and how archaeological scientists must be very disciplined not to reach into those spaces and create their own stories! We discussed the nature of truth, the fact that science is not always correct, the ethics of writing in terms of the degree to which writers should be bound by fact, and the racialized history of archaeology and anthropology. We then came back together to each reflect on how our thoughts had changed since the beginning of the day – were we still nervous, scared, anxious? We all felt that we needed time to process everything but at the same time several ideas and preoccupations began to emerge about what it means to engage with this material that make me excited about what is to come, and the poetry itself also seemed to have begun when Edson described feeling, as a result of the archaeological information, ‘closer to the shadows’ of the people whose lives we had glimpsed through their bones.
