Educational Resources

To engage communities with the NEXUS1492 research process and results, the project has developed and disseminated evidence-based educational resources on indigenous Caribbean heritage, including the Teaching Indigenous Heritage and History, the Seascapes Activity guides. The project has offered teacher training opportunities around these resources in the Caribbean and beyond.

Click this link to download Teaching Indigenous History and Heritage

Click here to download Enseñado Historia y Patrimonio Indígena

Click here to download Connecting Canoes. Understanding Seascapes in the Classroom

Click here to download Viajando en Canoas. Comprendiendo los Paisajes Marinos en el Aula

RowYerBoat

Nexus1492's RowYerBoat is a canoeing simulation game where you have to navigate a boat through the Caribbean Sea. Currents are making your way from one spot to another harder; find the best route and beat the global highscores in two campaigns containing three missions each.

Click this link to find the app in the Google Play Store.

PotBuilder

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.

Virtually Reconstructing Pots

Therefore, each sherd that is found during the excavation is documented in a database. Many attributes such as the diameter of the pot, the shape of the vessel, the lip shape, the color and a variety of other features are recorded. Unfortunately, most of the sherds found are quite small, and it is very rare to find a complete vessel. So in order to get a better impression of what the pots originally looked like, I created a web-based tool to virtually reconstruct the complete pots based on these database entries.

This enables archaeologists to visualize the types of pots that were once used on a site. It also has potential use for community outreach, for example in school projects or interactive museum exhibitions. If you want to try out the beta version of the PotBuilder for yourself, you can do this here.