Alternative Modernities and Everyday Life in the Pre-emancipation Southern Caribbean (c. 1634–1863)

Introduction

ISLANDLIVES will be the first interdisciplinary historical archaeological project to deploy a broad array of cutting-edge archaeological science techniques to study everyday life at multiple sites across multiple islands during a span of 229 years. The Dutch islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire (ABC islands) were unconventional colonies that did not fit the typical European model of plantation-driven modernity incepted in the Caribbean.

Research Context

Rather, they occupied a grey area, thriving on illicit trade with the Spanish mainland. Truly little, however, is known archaeologically about everyday life on the islands.

Methodology

By mobilizing terrestrial and maritime archaeological investigations, archival research, and various analyses, the project aims to reveal the inner workings of alternative modernities in the 17th- through 19th-century Southern Caribbean. The techniques to be employed include:

1. Archaeometric analyses
2. Proteomic analyses
3. Archaeobotanical analyses
4. Collagen fingerprinting
5. Zooarchaeological analyses

The bulk of evidence will be obtained through archaeological excavations at six sites, the careful interpretation of which will generate the first comprehensive cross-section of everyday lives across the ABC islands.

Expected Outcomes

Archaeometric analyses will, moreover, provide unprecedented clarity on the provenance and dating of poorly identified European and regional ceramics ubiquitous on the islands and in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean regions.

Societal Impact

This project is therefore geared to advance research on how different island peoples, including free and enslaved blacks, indigenous people, Sephardim, and Dutch, navigated modernity in their own contested and contingent ways.

Engagement with Contemporary Issues

Finally, these new understandings will be productively engaged with the present. In this way, ISLANDLIVES also aims to reveal how insights from past alternative modernities can help us better understand contemporary ABC-island societies and, ultimately, critically challenge deep-rooted Eurocentric narratives about the past in the present.