By Dr. Tracie Mayfield, Ph.D. (RPA 4754)
This summer Dr. Tracie Mayfield and USC students Anna Finkel and Gillian Sawyer, along with other students from schools around the world, completed an archaeological field school on Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands, Colombia. Dr. Mayfield’s (Principal Investigator) faculty team also included three former USC students: Matthew Conway (project co-director), Luis Rodriguez-Perez (field survey and ethnography supervisor), and Madison Lin (cinematography and ethnography supervisor).
The islands of Old Providence and Santa Catalina -located 130 miles of the coast of Nicaragua and around 8.5 square miles in size- have been a center of global trade and commerce since the establishment of an English colony in 1629 and are still occupied by the descendants of the original colonists, African slaves, and members of at least one Maroon village made up of self-emancipated peoples, to this day. Puritan venture capitalists financed the primary colonization of Old Providence and Santa Catalina –whose members arrived on the Seaflower, sister ship to the Mayflower– one year after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what was to become the United States.
Since 1629, the Islands have been episodically under the administration of England, Spain, English & French privateers, and Colombia. The Islands served time as a base for the infamous Henry Morgan in the late 1600s to ready for his assault on Panama in 1671, inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write the book “Treasure Island” after visiting in the 1800s, and was as a residence of Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.
This ongoing, community-led archaeological project seeks to assist ongoing Native efforts to untangle and decolonize the complex culture history of the Islands by collecting oral histories and archaeologically exploring three foundational landscapes: 1) the original town of New Westminster -1629- located on the north side of Old Providence Island, 2) the natural and modified gully systems utilized since the founding of the Colony for intra-island transportation and residential and agricultural water management, and 3) the Maroon community known to have been located on the southeast side of the Island.
Our 2022 field school -the second on the Islands- was a tremendous success. Our team of students and faculty were able to gather valuable information from a variety of sources; including material and spatial data from excavations and survey (dating from the 1600s the present), ethnographic data from oral histories and interviews, and ethnohistorical & archaeological data centered on how transportation systems, food production, governance, built-environment, and technology are used today and how those same activates were carried out in the past, allowing us to make connections between the Islands’ history, since the establishment of the Colony 1629 to the present. (photo above features Matthew Conway, former USC student and now co-director of the Project teaching students the art of using a shovel – photos below are of the project’s classroom and laboratory, and team members taking a boat tour of the Islands, photo by Luis Rodriguez-Perez)
Students played a critical role in all aspects of data collection: materials processing, and identification; photography; mapping and drawing; ethnographic interviews; riverine survey; and making preliminary interpretations from the data we gathered during the field school (photos below are of former USC student Luis Rodriguez-Perez -now a faculty member of the Project- and current USC students Anna Finkel and Gillian Sawyer).
During weekday mornings until around lunchtime, we worked on recovering artifacts from excavation sites (7 in total over 4 weeks!), conducted survey activities in the Islands’ gully system to recover artifacts and document archaeological features related to riverine activities, and completed twenty-four ethnographic interviews. In the afternoons, we worked on cleaning and processing recovered artifacts and faunal specimens in a lab we set up at Posada Enilda, where the team was staying during the field season. On the weekends, students had time off to explore the Islands and take part in leisure activities like hiking, snorkeling, SCUBA, horseback riding, and going to public events like concerts and festivals.
In the evenings, we had presentations on various subjects relating to archaeological and ethnographic theoretical foundations, field and laboratory methods, and types of data used in historical archaeology and the Project’s faculty presented on their areas of expertise, such as piracy in the Atlantic world and the Islands’ involvement in the golden age of piracy, marronage in what is now the Americas, including the role marronage played in the history of the Islands and the ethnogenesis of the Native Raizal population who have inhabited the Islands since the founding of the Colony, and photo/video recordation best practices. Because community voice is an important aspect of the Project’s overall mission, we invited Native Raizal to speak to us in the evenings, as well. Native presentations included topics such as farming and food sustainability; art and culture; and bush medicine. (photo below is former USC student, Madison Lindsey [photo by Luis Rodriguez-Perez], who now a faculty member of the project, & Luis-Rodriguez-Perez and Gillian Sawyer doing an ethnographic interview [photo by Oral Chamorro])
An additional success of the 2022 field season was the growing bond and connections the Project has with the local community. Our Native monitors (we have a cultural monitor, environment monitor, and an environmental monitor who work with us daily while we are on the Islands) were fantastic and added a great deal of value to our data, by facilitating access to private properties, assisting in setting up ethnographic interviews, and being onsite daily to answer questions and give us advice.
Our students and faculty also had the opportunity to participate in a traditional Raizal rundown: an all-day meal event where we took part in everything from food preparation and cooking, to visiting with our resident collaborators and enjoying the beach, to eating the delicious fruits of our labor in the afternoon!
Another important aspect of the 2022 research season was a public presentation given by the Project. During the presentation we disseminated data collected during the 2019 field school and informed the public of our plans for the current season’s data collection. We also invited the public to stop by our sites and the field laboratory at any time; and many local residents visited us during the field season to ask questions and learn more about the work we are doing. The Project also works with a local reporter, Dean Hyman of TeleIslas News, who came out to our sites almost daily to speak with our students (photos below are of Dr. Mayfield’s public presentation and former USC archaeology students, Matthew Conway and Luis Rodriguez-Perez being interviewed onsite).
Students produced original research designs (topic of their choosing) to present to the other students and faculty towards the end of the field season. Instead of a final research paper, students were challenged to come up with a research topic or question and then present ‘how’ they would do the research. For example, what is their research question/problem orientation (e.g. what do you want they know?) …where would their data come from? …what issues might come up during research? …where would they present their research, once completed? The students came up with creative and exciting topics and few of those projects will continue over the next few years, some including a second season on the Islands to do further research and collect additional data.
The Project will disseminate the data our team collected this summer in a variety of ways. For one, a detailed site report will be produced -which will include all our findings and data- and the faculty will be writing blogs and articles for a variety of platforms and presenting at national and international conferences in 2022 and 2023. More to come as we work on our analysis of the data collected this summer!
Photos (above) by Luis Rodriguez-Perez
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