As we have seen, museums in Europe house many archaeological artefacts from the Caribbean. Of course, the Caribbean itself is also home to many museums and collections. Previously, these museums were only researched individually, or within one linguistic area, such as the English-speaking Caribbean. This research project was the first to conduct a region-wide study of museums in the Caribbean and, in particular, its focus was on community engagement. In essence, community engagement is the myriad of ways in which museums involve communities in any part of their work. As you can imagine, the diversity of cultures and communities in the Caribbean provided a unique and optimal setting for such a study.

Within the NEXUS1492 project, my research looks at the ceramic transformation that occurred in Spanish towns in early colonial Hispaniola as a result of the Amerindian-Spanish-African interactions that occurred within these towns. Potentially, this project will give some insight in how people were dealing with the changing cultural environment around them.

NEXUS1492 has released educational activities to use with primary and secondary school-aged children. With Collecting Canoes, teachers and educators across the Caribbean and beyond can discover travel, migration and exchange in the pre-colonial Caribbean.

When we research human migration in the past, it is a challenge to pinpoint where exactly different individuals and groups came from. A new study published in PLOS ONE describes a new method to accurately identify the origins of individual humans using archaeological remains. In an interdisciplinary effort, the NEXUS1492 team members Dr. Jason Laffoon, Dr. Till Sonnemann and Dr. Termeh Shafie, in collaboration with the nexus principal investigators, combined their expertise in isotope studies, GIS and statistics, developing a new approach to identify the origin of pre-colonial Caribbean settlers. DNA alone cannot tell us where someone came fromDNA studies are widely known methods for research on humans and human remains, but when it concerns geographic origins, these genetic studies are more informative about someone’s ancestors than about an individual’s actual (childhood) origin, explains Dr. Laffoon. Isotopes, in contrast, are increasingly applied to investigate origins in archaeological and forensic research, and have been highly successful at distinguishing between locally born people and immigrants. While we can identify which humans are not locals, such methods had not yet made much progress in identifying individual origins.

My thesis consists of three parts that can be viewed separately but ultimately all contribute to the big picture of showing the relationships between locations and assemblages of archaeological material in the Caribbean.

Networks of interaction between past cultures and communities cannot be observed completely since archaeological evidence (e.g., artefact counts) and historical documentation (e.g., manuscripts) are fragmentary and do not provide enough information to get anywhere near a complete picture of networks in the past. However, this little information can be used to specify statistical models allowing to infer missing links and generate plausible pictures of networks in the past.

One of the main types of artifacts found during excavations in the Caribbean are ceramic sherds. They are the remains of different types of vessels used by the indigenous populations for various purposes. Archaeologists are interested in pottery remains for their potential to help explain cultural practices, but also because similarities among assemblages of pottery can serve as a proxy to reconstruct relationships between sites and islands in the Caribbean.

At the small suburb of Brede, just 14 kilometers north of Copenhagen, Denmark’s oldest industrial complex houses part of the collections of the National Museum of Denmark. This includes one of the largest collections of Caribbean archaeological artefacts in an European public museum. More than 7.000 objects – stone collars and axes, three-pointers, beads and pendants, ceramic bowls, pots, and sherds, among many other items – are organized and carefully preserved as part of the collection of the National Museum of Denmark.

The excavation team at La Poterie, Grenada hosted an open day for the public on Thursday January 19 2017. During the event, there was a lot of interest from members of the local Grenadian community, who have been following the progression of the fieldwork over the past years. The excavation team provided information on their findings and the different styles of the pottery found in the area. Local media also attended the event, including a team from the Government Information Channel, who conducted interviews with prof. dr. Corinne Hofman, NEXUS researcher Angus Martin, local collaborators and partners en students from Leiden University.

Dr. Ivan Roksandic of Winnipeg University visited the NEXUS 1492 team at Leiden University. He combines archaeology, linguistics and text analysis in a multidisciplinary approach to study toponyms: Dr. Roksandic studies Caribbean place names with origins in indigenous languages. During his visit to Leiden, he gave a talk and explored possibilities for collaboration with the NEXUS group. He shares some thoughts about his work and potential synergies.