On the Caribbean island of St. Croix, archival documents reference settlements of runaway enslaved Africans in the mountainous range known as Maroon Ridge. These settlements provide an important record of Afro-Atlantic resistance to enslavement. However, as both intentionally secluded and ephemeral places of refuge, these maroon settlements are difficult to locate in the archaeological record. Geospatial modeling provides one avenue for understanding African geographies of resistance. Building on prior geospatial modeling efforts, this paper uses a GIS-based multicriteria suitability analysis to characterize the shifting affordances of marronage on Danish colonial St. Croix across the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering how the island landscape “looked” to those seeking refuge, we trace how possibilities for refuge were distributed through space and over time. In this paper, we develop affordance heuristics to model refuge using digitized historic maps and publicly available LiDAR data. The resulting model suggests shifting maroon refugia sites over time and demonstrates how geospatial approaches, paired with historical archives, can model historic affordances across time.

在加勒比海的圣克罗伊岛，档案文件提到了逃跑的非洲奴隶在被称为 Maroon Ridge 的山区定居点。这些定居点提供了非洲-大西洋地区抵抗奴隶制的重要记录。然而，作为刻意隐蔽和短暂的避难所，这些黑人定居点很难在考古记录中找到。地理空间建模为了解非洲的抵抗地理提供了一种途径。在先前的地理空间建模工作的基础上，本文使用基于 GIS 的多标准适宜性分析来描述 18 世纪下半叶丹麦殖民地圣克罗伊岛的 marronage 变化。通过考虑岛屿景观对寻求避难所的人来说 “样貌”，我们追溯了避难的可能性是如何在空间和时间上分布的。在本文中，我们开发了可供性启发式方法，以使用数字化的历史地图和公开可用的 LiDAR 数据对避难所进行建模。由此产生的模型表明，栗色避难所地点会随时间推移而变化，并展示了地理空间方法如何与历史档案相结合，对跨时间的历史可供性进行建模。