Bone button blanks and manufacturing debris from prison component.

The team found eighty-five buttons in the excavation areas of the former prison interior, along with bone button blanks, or debris from their manufacture. Such buttons were made from the ribs and scapulae of domestic mammals like cows and pig. Finds of similar debris at the British military site of Brimstone Hill on St. Kitts have been associated with the labor of both soldiers and of those enslaved at the fortress, while bone debris at Parramatta/Rose Hill in Australia from a similar time has also been associated with convict labor. Incidentally, buttons recovered at the Ross Female Factory, a women’s prison also located in Australia, have been posited by Eleanor Casella as being related to informal economies and illicit barter operating within the prison.