“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.”
These are the phrases of Christian Oldendorp, a Danish missionary who visited the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1767. His account is among the few Danish historic information of Maronberg, a neighborhood of escaped slaves, generally known as Maroons, within the northwest mountain ranges of the island.
In 1733, the Danish West India-Guinea Firm bought St. Croix from France and rapidly expanded the island’s sugar and cotton manufacturing. This additionally meant increasing the slave inhabitants to reap profitable plantations. However the Danes had been by no means capable of totally management the island – or the enslaved. By the top of the 1700s, almost 1,400 folks – greater than 10% of the enslaved inhabitants – efficiently escaped captivity. However the place did they escape to? Solely not too long ago have researchers began to shed extra mild on this centuries-old thriller.
As an archaeologist specializing in slavery and resistance, I’ve excavated plantations within the Americas and used geographic info techniques to mannequin Maroon escape routes by sea. Not too long ago, I turned my consideration to Maroon settlements on land, working with a staff of archaeologists to find Maronberg.
Maroon Ridge on St. Croix is believed to have been house to a whole bunch of escaped enslaved folks from 1733-1848.
Justin Dunnavant, CC BY
Honoring a legacy
I first discovered about Maronberg on a nature tour of St. Croix given by native activist and College of the Virgin Islands professor Olasee Davis in 2016. At the moment, I used to be on the island to excavate a sugar plantation, a mission that gave my colleagues and me a novel perspective on the enslaved expertise within the Danish-controlled Caribbean.
In August 2025, Davis’ decades-long marketing campaign to create an official heritage sanctuary to guard Maronberg lastly got here to fruition. The native authorities bought 2,386 acres of land to function the U.S. Virgin Islands Maroon Territorial Park.
However one downside stays: We’ve got but to search out the bodily stays of the settlement. Finding and preserving Maronberg’s historic artifacts and buildings may present new perception into residents’ lifestyle and provides better that means to the sanctuary.
Fortuitously, superior laptop modeling and high-resolution maps are serving to us get nearer to pinpointing the settlement.
Discovering what was meant to stay hidden
Many Maroon settlements within the Americas have proved troublesome to find. This is sensible when you think about that their inhabitants had been attempting to cover from colonial settlers. If the Danes had discovered Maronberg, they might have both killed its inhabitants or pressured them again into slavery.
Runaways tended to settle in areas that had been deliberately troublesome to entry, like distant swampy or mountainous terrain. Homes and different shelters typically consisted of semipermanent buildings in order that Maroons may relocate as wanted to keep away from detection.
The boundaries of Maronberg and the scale of the settlement alongside the northwestern mountain vary stay unknown. Colonial militias tried periodic raids, however historic information report 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 these precautions paid off: The Danes had been by no means capable of penetrate the Maroons’ encampment.
Utilizing new tech to see 300 years into the previous
Latest makes an attempt by researchers to find Maronberg started in 2007, with extra in depth geographic info techniques mapping carried out in 2008. These digital, computer-based geographic packages permit researchers to retailer a spread of geological knowledge and mannequin spatial patterns throughout huge terrains.
Pairing a historic map with a low-resolution elevation map from the U.S. Geological Survey, archaeologist Bo Ejstrud created a predictive mannequin to evaluate the possible location of the Maroon settlement. He thought-about elevation, slope and colonial infrastructure to establish essentially the most distant areas of St. Croix with the least visibility from colonial traces of sight.
Again within the 1700s, city facilities accounted for under a small share of the general landmass of the 83-square-mile (215-square-kilometer) island. A lot of the land was both plantations or uninhabited forests and mountains. Ejstrud’s mannequin reaffirmed the chance of a Maroon settlement within the northwest area. Nevertheless it left us with a large survey space. The map additionally didn’t account for the likelihood that the settlement moved over time.
In 2020, I teamed up with archaeologists Steven Wernke, from Vanderbilt College’s Spatial Evaluation Analysis Laboratory, and Lauren Kohut, from Winthrop College’s Geospatial Environmental Modeling Lab. Collectively, we developed and visualized a extra dynamic mannequin utilizing advances in mapping since 2008.
We started by digitizing two of essentially the most detailed colonial maps of St. Croix – one from 1750 and one other from 1799. These maps, created by Danish army engineers and surveyors, element the unfold of plantations, roads and settlements over time.
Subsequent, so as to construct a digital elevation mannequin of the island’s terrain, we included high-resolution mild detection and ranging, or lidar, knowledge collected by the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Whereas conventional digital elevation fashions will be skewed by dense vegetation and timber, lidar makes use of laser pulses that penetrate by way of the forest cover to map the Earth’s floor. This expertise permits us to investigate among the most secluded, inaccessible areas on the island. Previous to 2013, lidar was too pricey for archaeological analysis functions. However as of late, it’s constructed into many cellphones.
By layering these datasets in geographic info techniques software program, we created a suitability mannequin that estimated the place Maroon settlements had been most certainly to have existed. Along with isolation and visibility, we additionally included accessibility to water sources and terrain ruggedness to mannequin the diploma of mobility by way of the panorama.
This method allowed us to simulate how the alternatives and constraints the panorama supplied to folks in search of refuge shifted as colonial society grew over time.
The pink areas point out the place on St. Croix that Maroons might have settled. The realm shrank between 1750 and 1799, because the Danish settlers unfold out.
Lauren Kohut, Steven A. Wernke and Justin Dunnavant, CC BY
Mapping modifications
Along with offering extra nuance to the image of the areas the place Maroons doubtlessly settled, our analysis means that the Maroon settlement wasn’t static, however possible waned as colonial infrastructure elevated on the island. Our mannequin implies that the realm of appropriate land for clandestine Maroon communities shrank by greater than 90% in simply 50 years.
It’s potential that over time there have been fewer runaways. Extra possible, extra Maroons left the island by boat for locations comparable to Puerto Rico and Tortola.
The place we go from right here
Although our findings nonetheless don’t present a precise location for Maronberg, they get us one step nearer to finding the bodily stays of this centuries-old Maroon neighborhood. The following step will likely be to go to these websites and survey them for proof of historic settlement. Archaeological analysis at these websites would assist us perceive extra in regards to the Maroons who turned a rugged panorama right into a sanctuary for freedom.
In the end, figuring out artifacts and historic websites inside the newly established U.S. Virgin Islands Maroon Territorial Park would assist us develop instructional excursions and honor the Maroon legacy.
