Pirates of 18th-Century Belize

Archaeologists have been digging at a site called "Barcadares" in Belize, 15 miles up the Belize River from the sea, occupied around 1720 by a gang of wastrels who divided their energies between illegal logwood cutting, poaching, and piracy:

Their living conditions were rustic to say the least. There were no houses, and the men slept on raised platforms with a canvas over them to keep the mosquitoes out. They hunted and gathered a good deal of their food.

Capt. Nathaniel Uring, a merchant seaman who was shipwrecked and spent more than four months with the inhabitants, described them in the book The Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring (reprinted in 1928 by Cassell and Company) as a "rude drunken crew, some which have been pirates, and most of them sailors."

Their "chief delight is in drinking; and when they broach a quarter cask or a hogshead of Bottle Ale or Cyder, keeping at it sometimes a week together, drinking till they fall asleep; and as soon as they awake at it again, without stirring off the place." Eventually Captain Uring returned to Jamaica and, in 1726, published an account of his adventures.

So, you might wonder, what sort of stuff do archaeologists find at an outlaw camp? And the answer is, the same sort of stuff you find at any other site in the Caribbean occupied by Europeans. Lots of tobacco pipes, for example.

And European pottery.

And case bottles, which were used for rum, among other things, which sounds pirate-like, but everybody in the 18th-century drank rum and you find case bottle fragments everywhere.

The lesson is -- with a pedant like me, after all, there is always a lesson -- that people's material culture is mostly determined by their civilization, not their occupations. Looking at the artifacts from any post-medieval archaeological site, the thing you can immediately tell is what period it dates to. Just a glance at the artifacts from this pirate's den tells me it dates to 1710 to 1740, based on my experience with tenant farms in Virginia and Delaware. The second thing you may pick up is how rich the people were; but I emphasize the "may," because the artifacts don't always show this, and your best clue is the size of their houses. You will find it very hard to tell, from the archaeology, the race, gender, or ethnicity of the people who lived at your site, or their occupation, religion, politics, or even whether they were outlaws. Think about contemporary American criminals; they live in the same kind of houses and apartments as law-abiding people, and while they may have particular tastes in things like cars and clothes, those tastes overlap with the tastes of insurance agents. They may identify with outlaws of the past, but their material lives are radically different from those of 19th-century gangsters or 18th-century pirates.

This is both the strength and weakness of archaeology. It shows you plain as day how greatly all human lives are dominated by the material circumstances and basic expectations of our civilizations. And it misses vast amounts about our mental and emotional worlds.