“For a long time now, a large number of [escaped slaves] have established themselves on lofty Maroon Hill in the mountains toward the west end of the island [of St. Croix]. … They are there protected by the impenetrable bush and by their own wariness.”
The ones are the phrases of Christian Oldendorp, a Danish missionary who visited the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1767. His account is without doubt one of the few Danish ancient information of Maronberg, a group of escaped slaves, referred to as Maroons, within the northwest mountain levels of the island.
In 1733, the Danish West India-Guinea Corporate bought St. Croix from France and briefly expanded the island’s sugar and cotton manufacturing. This additionally supposed increasing the slave inhabitants to reap profitable plantations. However the Danes had been by no means in a position to completely keep watch over the island – or the enslaved. By way of the tip of the 1700s, just about 1,400 folks – greater than 10% of the enslaved inhabitants – effectively escaped captivity. However the place did they break out to? Handiest not too long ago have researchers began to shed extra mild in this centuries-old thriller.
As an archaeologist that specialize in slavery and resistance, I’ve excavated plantations within the Americas and used geographic data techniques to fashion Maroon break out routes via sea. Lately, I became my consideration to Maroon settlements on land, running with a crew of archaeologists to find Maronberg.
Maroon Ridge on St. Croix is assumed to had been house to loads of escaped enslaved folks from 1733-1848.
Justin Dunnavant, CC BY
Honoring a legacy
I first realized about Maronberg on a nature excursion of St. Croix given via native activist and College of the Virgin Islands professor Olasee Davis in 2016. At the moment, I used to be at the island to excavate a sugar plantation, a challenge that gave my colleagues and me a novel point of view at the enslaved revel in within the Danish-controlled Caribbean.
In August 2025, Davis’ decades-long marketing campaign to create an respectable heritage sanctuary to give protection to Maronberg in any case got here to fruition. The native govt bought 2,386 acres of land to function the U.S. Virgin Islands Maroon Territorial Park.
However one drawback stays: We have now but to search out the bodily stays of the agreement. Finding and protecting Maronberg’s ancient artifacts and constructions may provide new perception into citizens’ way of living and provides higher that means to the sanctuary.
Thankfully, complex laptop modeling and high-resolution maps are serving to us get nearer to pinpointing the agreement.
Discovering what used to be supposed to stay hidden
Many Maroon settlements within the Americas have proved tough to find. This is sensible while you imagine that their population had been seeking to conceal from colonial settlers. If the Danes had discovered Maronberg, they’d have both killed its population or pressured them again into slavery.
Runaways tended to settle in spaces that had been deliberately tough to get entry to, like far off swampy or mountainous terrain. Properties and different shelters ceaselessly consisted of semipermanent constructions in order that Maroons may just relocate as had to steer clear of detection.
The limits of Maronberg and the dimensions of the agreement alongside the northwestern mountain vary stay unknown. Colonial militias tried periodic raids, however ancient information record that they had been met with rugged terrain, booby traps and counterattacks.
The missionary Oldendorp wrote: “[The Maroons] keep every approach safe by attempting carefully to conceal small, pointed stakes of poisoned wood so that the unwary pursuer might wound his foot on them and therefore be prevented from continuing the chase as a result of the unbearable pain.”
All the ones precautions paid off: The Danes had been by no means in a position to penetrate the Maroons’ encampment.
The usage of new tech to peer 300 years into the previous
Fresh makes an attempt via researchers to find Maronberg started in 2007, with extra in depth geographic data techniques mapping performed in 2008. Those virtual, computer-based geographic techniques permit researchers to retailer a spread of geological knowledge and fashion spatial patterns throughout huge terrains.
Pairing a ancient map with a low-resolution elevation map from the U.S. Geological Survey, archaeologist Bo Ejstrud created a predictive fashion to evaluate the possible location of the Maroon agreement. He regarded as elevation, slope and colonial infrastructure to spot probably the most far off spaces of St. Croix with the least visibility from colonial strains of sight.
Again within the 1700s, city facilities accounted for just a small proportion of the full landmass of the 83-square-mile (215-square-kilometer) island. A lot of the land used to be both plantations or uninhabited forests and mountains. Ejstrud’s fashion reaffirmed the chance of a Maroon agreement within the northwest area. Nevertheless it left us with an enormous survey space. The map additionally didn’t account for the chance that the agreement moved over the years.
In 2020, I teamed up with archaeologists Steven Wernke, from Vanderbilt College’s Spatial Research Analysis Laboratory, and Lauren Kohut, from Winthrop College’s Geospatial Environmental Modeling Lab. In combination, we advanced and visualized a extra dynamic fashion the usage of advances in mapping since 2008.
We started via digitizing two of probably the most detailed colonial maps of St. Croix – one from 1750 and some other from 1799. Those maps, created via Danish army engineers and surveyors, element the unfold of plantations, roads and settlements over the years.
Subsequent, so as to construct a virtual elevation fashion of the island’s terrain, we integrated high-resolution mild detection and varying, or lidar, knowledge accumulated via the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Management. While conventional virtual elevation fashions may also be skewed via dense plants and timber, lidar makes use of laser pulses that penetrate during the woodland cover to map the Earth’s floor. This generation lets in us to research one of the maximum secluded, inaccessible spaces at the island. Previous to 2013, lidar used to be too expensive for archaeological analysis functions. However at the moment, it’s constructed into many cell phones.
By way of layering those datasets in geographic data techniques device, we created a suitability fashion that estimated the place Maroon settlements had been perhaps to have existed. Along with isolation and visibility, we additionally integrated accessibility to water assets and terrain ruggedness to fashion the stage of mobility during the panorama.
This means allowed us to simulate how the alternatives and constraints the panorama presented to folks in quest of shelter shifted as colonial society grew over the years.
The purple spaces point out the place on St. Croix that Maroons can have settled. The world shrank between 1750 and 1799, because the Danish settlers unfold out.
Lauren Kohut, Steven A. Wernke and Justin Dunnavant, CC BY
Mapping adjustments
Along with offering extra nuance to the image of the spaces the place Maroons doubtlessly settled, our analysis means that the Maroon agreement wasn’t static, however most likely waned as colonial infrastructure greater at the island. Our fashion means that the world of appropriate land for clandestine Maroon communities shrank via greater than 90% in simply 50 years.
It’s imaginable that over the years there have been fewer runaways. Much more likely, extra Maroons left the island via boat for locations akin to Puerto Rico and Tortola.
The place we pass from right here
Regardless that our findings nonetheless don’t supply a precise location for Maronberg, they get us one step nearer to finding the bodily stays of this centuries-old Maroon group. Your next step can be to consult with those websites and survey them for proof of ancient agreement. Archaeological analysis at those websites would assist us perceive extra concerning the Maroons who became a rugged panorama right into a sanctuary for freedom.
In the end, figuring out artifacts and ancient websites inside the newly established U.S. Virgin Islands Maroon Territorial Park would assist us increase tutorial excursions and honor the Maroon legacy.
