Cimarron camp

I have recently built a few terrain elements for my West Indies Cimarrons, aka Maroon Negroes, including a small hut, a camp fire, a barbecue, and a row of impaled human skulls.

The hut is based on period images, as well as on early 20th Century photographs of Cimarron dwellings from the Caribbean and from Dutch Suriname in South America. It is a very simple post-and-beam frame structure paneled with light wattle-work obtained by weaving palm leaf strips around upright wooden stakes. Palm leaves are also used for roofing. The hut features a small door and has no windows. West Indies slave cabins were built much along similar lines.  

As usual, I built the base structure of the hut and of the roof using corrugated cardboard.

I crafted the wattle-work panels with thin household twine and narrow strips of craft paper, which I trimmed to size and glued onto the cardboard structure. 

I likewise used craft paper and household twine to make the palm leaves for the roof. Several leaf layers were required to achieve the desired roof thickness.

Finally, I glued lengths of thicker household twine onto the wattle-work to represent the hut's post-and-beam frame, and gave the whole thing a few diluted washes of acrylic paint.

The large camp fire and the barbecue, or perhaps a fish-smoking grill, are based on the wonderful watercolors by the English explorer, John White (1539-1593) (wikipedia here), as well as on the much cruder, but equally attractive, drawings by the anonymous author of the synchronous manuscript, Histoire Naturelle des Indes (here).

I crafted the embers with ground cork, partially covered with papier-mâché and painted charcoal black. The charred logs are made from household twine.

The set of impaled human skulls - a gruesome warning to unwelcome visitors that was displayed outside Maroon villages following West African traditions - is based on an illustration in Expedition to Surinam, the journal of the Dutch soldier of Scottish descent, Cpt. John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797) (wikipedia here).

I sculpted the master of a human skull, made a mold of it, and cast several resin skulls. My master comes complete with the lower jawbone, but I removed it from the castings as this part of the skull becomes loose and was rarely present in such macabre displays.