Historical Archaeology and the British Atlantic World, AD 1600-1800

The colonial archaeology of the British Atlantic world has been the major focus of the archaeology of early modern literate societies since the 1960s. This research brings to completion a book that draws together the principal results of fieldwork across the circum-Atlantic world - in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and the United Kingdom - and summarises the contribution of this work to our knowledge of a number of key themes in early modern Atlantic history. It provides a comparative investigation of how studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century archaeological material can contribute to our understanding of British colonialism.

By providing integrated accounts of early modern Atlantic historical archaeology, and a bibliographic essay on historical archaeology in the early modern Atlantic, the research compares the alternative approaches of regional traditions of historical archaeology around the Atlantic rim. The research will inform the development of further research in historical archaeology and the history of the early modern Atlantic, and will represent an extended case study in comparative world archaeology and the archaeology of colonialism. The results of the research will also be presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology's international conference at Jamestown, Virginia.