The Final Analysis of Weights from Port Royal, Jamaica

Description

The assemblage of weights recovered from excavations at Port Royal, Jamaica is the largest collection of seventeenth-century weights recovered from a single colonial site. On June 7, 1692, an earthquake shook the community of Port Royal, and in a matter of minutes 32 acres of the colonial port community sank into Kingston Harbor. To date, 90 weights have been recovered from nautical and terrestrial excavations at the site. Many of these bear the stamps and ciphers of English trade guilds, owners’ marks and regal stamps of authority. Several weights in the collection also bear a mark associated with the City of London. Combining data from archaeological excavations with information from wills, inventories and data from comparative assemblage known as the Streeter Collection, this book offers a multi-disciplinary analysis of the weights collection, contributing a great deal of information about local and long-distance trade and commercial patterns in colonial Jamaica.