The contradictory behaviour of the Quakers, specifically slave-owning Quakers, seems to be part of what drives Mr. Chenoweth’s interest
The team at work excavating for the smallest fragments. Photo courtesy of John Chenoweth.
Mr. Chenoweth began his anthropological study of the Quaker community while completing his master’s thesis. “I got my master’s at U Penn, which turned out to be a site associated with Quakers,” he said. In fact, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was founded by a Quaker, William Penn. “I found it very interesting from an anthropological point of view. It’s sort of a contradictory religion.There’s this big religious structure about meetings that tell you how to live your life...and yet the whole point of Quakerism is that you don’t need a church; you don’t need a minister; you don’t need anything between you and God.” According to Mr. Chenoweth, whose research on Little Jost Van Dyke will contribute to his doctoral dissertation at UC Berkeley, when Quakerism first started in the mid-17th century, many members of the faith took on missionary roles and brought their religion to the Caribbean, hoping to convert the masses. “There were communities of Quakers in Jamaica and Barbados, and to a lesser extent in Antigua and Nevis in the 1600s,” he said, mentioning the difficulty of studying those populations because of the unreliability of the recordkeeping at the time. “It’s really hard to say who lived where, and even if you have a list of the members of the meeting, you don’t know which plantation you’re looking at belonged to which family...so it’s difficult to talk about where the
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Quakers were.” The uniqueness of the Lettsom family on Little Jost is that they occupied an entire island. “I thought this would be very helpful because, by itself on an island, it means that everything on that island, in theory, is connected to them,” he said. By the 1700s, the other Quaker communities in the Caribbean had dissipated, Mr. Chenoweth said. “Either the members decided that Quakerism wasn’t for them, or they moved back to England,” especially many in Jamaica who departed after a large earthquake in 1692. “So, by the 1740s, when the community here started up, there were virtually no Quakers in the Caribbean...and that’s what makes this community interesting, in part, is that it sort of popped up at a time when there were no other similar communities that had managed to survive.” He
As we stood outside his research team’s home base by Smugglers Cove while one of his research assistants sifted through bags of dirt searching for artefacts, Mr. Chenoweth recounted when he read about the community of Quakers that moved here in the 1740s, he thought, “‘That’s really different and really odd.’ The strangest thing about them is that they owned slaves, and that makes no sense whatsoever because Quakers believe in complete equality and non-violence.” The contradictory behaviour of the Quakers, specifically slave-owning Quakers, seems to be part of what drives Mr. Chenoweth’s interest in his research, but he also clearly possesses a desire to speak for those who have been previously silent. “One of the things I’m really interested in is the relationship between the owners and The contradictory behaviour of the Quakers, specifically slave-owning the enslaved Quakers, seems to be part of what drives Mr. Chenoweth’s interest… people,” he said, “partly because historical archaeology’s real strength is telling the story of people who then added, “I’d like to be able to say how or why, but weren’t able to write their own history.” One of the that’s part of the question that I’m trying to explore main differences between historical archaeology, here, how Quakerism is connected to the Caribbean which Mr. Chenoweth describes as archaeology of the environment—the slave economy, the plantation last 500 years, and prehistoric archaeology is that “you economy, the social environment that was down here between the Quakers and the white planters, the free can take the bits and pieces of trash and combine that with the historical records and history books African-descended people and the enslaved people.”
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