Archaeological Excavations
“Kasnan di katibu” in Papiamentu or slave houses, Witte Pan (White Saltpan), Bonaire.
We undertake high-resolution archaeological excavations across the ABC islands. We focus our attention, firstly, on households as these are the places where everyday life was anchored and friction between the public and private could rearticulate materiality, culture, and power into alternative modernities. Secondly, we investigate temporary campsites, since these are unique liminal places where social behaviors that were different from everyday life in the home could range from the unusual to the subversive.
Urban and rural sites are compared, and the sites studied will include places occupied by freedpeople, Dutch colonists, Sephardi merchants, and enslaved and indigenous people. We keenly work across the intersections of race/ethnicity, religion, class, and gender in the past of the ABC islands to obtain a richer picture of past everyday life.
Our excavations are “high-resolution” since we employ an array of advanced technologies and state-of-the art approaches such as LiDAR, photogrammetry, GIS, and digital recording. These are coupled with our attentiveness to intrasite contextual relationships between artifacts and minimum number of vessel calculations and provide the requisite data richness to reconstruct the assemblages of practice at each site that reveal continuities and changes in everyday life through time.
Responsible of the research line
Konrad A. Antczak
Anthropological archaeologist
konrad.antczak@upf.edu
