Dr. Becki Scott is a post-doctoral researcher with the NWO Island Networks project at Leiden University. She is specialized in the analysis of archaeomaterials using a variety of analytical techniques.
In the beginning of December 2016 PhD-student Catarina Guzzo Falci was awarded a scholarship for a collections study by Musée du quai Branly. The Musée du quai Branly has implemented a scholarship program to document its collections. The scholarship’s purpose is the funding of field investigations and/or documentation on the museum’s collections on the arts and civilizations of Africa, Near East, Asia, Oceania and of the Americas. This is a grant for a short period of time, financed by the Society of Friends of the Museum and amounts to € 6,000. The money is intended to cover the costs of a field survey and/or of archival work to document the museum’s collections, as well as the analysis and writing required to present the results of the research work. Research may pertain to a single work, a series of objects or images (stamps, photos, etc.) a collection, an archival group (including audio archives) or ancient documents.
In October 2016, Dr. Darlene Weston (University of British Columbia, Leiden University) and Leiden University student Finn van der Leden studied skeletal remains from the Museo del Hombre Dominicano, in the Dominican Republic. Finn van der Leden shares his experiences below.
As a visualisation expert in a project focused on Caribbean archaeology, a significant part of my work consists of making maps. They might be maps of one excavation area, an entire island, or a larger region. They might show ceramic assemblages, settlement patterns, or cultural heritage. They might be used to visually explore a dataset and uncover new patterns, to communicate established results in a scientific publication, or to inform the general public about ongoing work. The one thing they all have in common is that they represent geo-referenced data (information associated with specific locations).
As archaeologists, we attempt to understand the choices and movements made by people in the past. One method used to do this is the study of the objects people left behind. We can study the pots, bowls, and other objects made of ceramic and use these to reconstruct past behaviour. Ceramic pots are a brilliant resource for achieving this aim because everyone used them. Indigenous communities on the islands made and used ceramic objects before and after the contact period. We can study these materials to determine the changes that occurred over time, and begin to understand the influence of various cultural interactions.
In the Montecristi Province most of people reject or ignore the presence of the indigenous populations and even Africans on the region, these indigenous landscapes have become invisible for most of the current population. The relation to any of these groups is underestimated and criticised or in the best case it is romanticised. Besides historical reasons, this is also due to a deficient in education on the history before Columbus, and the lack of relations to a previous pre-colonial period and its cultural, economic and political contexts.
NEXUS1492 is presenting a paper at the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting (16-20 November 2016) in Minneapolis, USA this week. The paper on Caribbean Encounters, Material Engagements and the Making of Europe, is part of a session about Evidence and its Effects in the Archaeology of Colonialism.
From 8 to 10 November, NEXUS1492 researchers met and participated in workshops and hackathons to further collaborations between project partners. Over the span of 2 days, several parallel small-group sessions were organized, where the 20 participants developed ideas and plans for transdisciplinary collaboration within the NEXUS programme. On the second day, a public lecture by archaeologist dr. Stefan Hauser was hosted by Konstanz University. Prof. Dr. Hauser discussed Trading in Palmyra: Past, Present and Future.
Last Friday 4th November, the annual History Day organized by ICLON took place in the Museum of Ethnology, Leiden where Dutch history teachers came together to participate in a full day of lectures and workshops. The theme for this year was Europeans from overseas – contacts – representation.
On Monday 17 October 2016, the Faculty of Archaeology hosted the international symposium “Collecting the 19th century: archaeological and museological perspectives from Europe and Latin America”, organized by dr. Mariana de Campos Françozo (Leiden University) and Maria Patricia Ordoñez (Leiden University).
