‘The Island of the Clouds’: The archaeology of life on the margins in a small-scale Caribbean island landscape: Bequia (St Vincent Grenadines) c. AD1700-1900

The study of marginal Caribbean islands and economies remains understated within the wider context of the discipline of Caribbean historical archaeology. Research has tended to focus mainly upon the study of the dominant site form of the colonial period in the region: the industrial sugar plantation, and mainly upon the larger islands. This contribution moves the scale of analysis to the smaller Caribbean island landscape as a whole entity, and attempts to frame an archaeological biography of Bequia in the St Vincent Grenadines over the last three hundred or so years. Further, we consider how more peripheral economic strategies that developed there over this period impacted upon this island landscape, how they are recognised archaeologically and what they can tell us about wider social and economic processes. Using landscape archaeology survey allied to GIS and historical cartographic analysis, the study presented here charts the emergence and development of a distinctive insular Caribbean socio-economic identity very much on the margins.