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Tracking Down The Marrons: Archaeo-Geography Of Marronage In The Caribbean, E. Kofi Agorsah

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

As the Maroons escaped from enslavement into unknown and inaccessible environments, they relied on their mental maps developed through sequential exploration of those environments to establish and defend their settlements. Initially they would take advantage of the knowledge of the areas surrounding the plantations from which they escaped, explore them thoroughly and then, at the appropriate time, link their escape routes and locations to those mental maps that they had acquired. That knowledge would have helped them to develop networks of familiar pathways and landmarks along, and around which, they arranged their settlements. This paper suggests that knowledge of such …