Caribbean Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology, War and Slavery, Materiality and Memory, Public Policy and Community Archaeology, Cultural Heritage Management
Zachary J. M. Beier is Lecturer in Archaeology. He specializes in the archaeology of the Caribbean with a particular focus on the historical archaeology of British colonial fortifications in the Atlantic world. Before joining the Department, he completed a Fulbright on the Caribbean island of Dominica investigating the material and spatial patterns of enslaved African laborers and soldiers at the Cabrits Garrison. His dissertation, titled All the King's Men: Slavery and Soldiering at the Cabrits Garrison, Dominica (1763-1854), combines this archaeological data with archival research in order to better figure the role of military labor in African-Caribbean society. In 2011, he was a Digital Archaeological Archives of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) Fellow at the International Centre for Jefferson Studies, where he worked on providing public access to research findings that aid in comparative approaches to Atlantic world slavery. He teaches a variety of archaeology courses at the undergraduate level and a graduate course on museums and their respective collections. His most recent projects include the archaeology of Fort Rocky, a British garrison in Kingston, Jamaica, occupied between the late nineteenth-century and first half of the twentieth-century by a mixture of European officers and African-Jamaican militia that in recent years has been used for a variety of contemporary purposes, including the filming of Jamaican dancehall music videos. Additionally, he is supervising archaeological investigations on the UWI Mona campus at the former sugar plantation works yard as well as at the White Marl TaĆno settlement, which was one of the largest indigenous villages in Jamaica between c. AD 900 through Spanish contact and colonialism. Finally, he has co-authored an edited volume with Dr. Christopher DeCorse featuring archaeological case studies of fortifications and their associated communities from around the British imperial world (in press for 2018 through the University Press of Florida).
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