PhD defence
Use of natural resources for indigenous ceramic production in the Lesser Antilles during the Ceramic Age and Early Colonial Period
- A. Stienaers
- Date
- Thursday 20 February 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
Supervisor(s)
- Prof.dr. P. Degryse
Summary
The cultural encounters between the Old and New Worlds are among the most infamous in human history. The Caribbean was the centre stage for interactions between cultures of dramatically different backgrounds, which after a turbulent colonial period eventually laid the foundations for the modern-day, multi-ethnic societies of the region. This project focuses on inter-community social relationships and transformations of island cultures, and societies in the Caribbean across the historical divide (AD 1000-1800). The primary aim is to understand the impacts of cultural encounters in the Caribbean by studying transformations in material culture. Continuity and change in the indigenous ceramic material culture repertoire, from the late pre-colonial to the early colonial period, will be studied. Amerindian ceramic manufacture and style across the historical divide, mixed Amerindian-African-European artifact assemblages dating to the early colonial period, and the provenance of the pottery and the interrelationships in manufacturing techniques and technological choices will be described. Provenance studies with methods including petrography and geochemistry (XRF, ICP-OES) will be performed. A compositional map of clay sources and pre-colonial pottery will be compiled as a baseline for this study.
PhD dissertations
Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.
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