Andrzej T. Antczak
(PhD University College London) is currently Associate Professor in Caribbean Archaeology and Chair of the Department of World Archaeology, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands, and curator of the archaeological collections at the Archaeology Research Unit at Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. His interests include island archaeology, indigenous ontologies, colonial encounters, zooarchaeology, and community archaeology. Since 1982, together with Ma.M. Antczak, he has carried out pioneering archaeological research on the off-shore islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean.
Maria Magdalena Antczak
(PhD University College London 2000) is currently a Researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands, and Associate Professor Archaeology Research Unit, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. She is founder and curator together with A.T. Antczak of the Archaeology Research Unit at the Simón Bolívar University, Caracas, Venezuela. Since 1982, Antczak has been co-director (also with A.T. Antczak) of pioneering archaeological investigations on the off-shore islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean. Her interests include the (re)construction of social past in pre-Hispanic north-central Venezuela, Amerindian ontologies, and the theory and method of signifying practices applied to the study of indigenous imagery.
Oliver Antczak
is a Researcher at the Archaeology Research Unit, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. Holding a Liberal Arts and Sciences BA from Leiden University College The Hague, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge he thus far has specialized in the intersections between diverse disciplines in the social-sciences/humanities. He currently focuses on heritage research, interested in how archaeological practice meets with the interests of modern populations, especially with relation to the constitution of identity, and the interrelations between identities, material culture, politics, and colonialism. He has conducted research mainly in the Venezuelan Caribbean.
Jaime J. Awe
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, Director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project, and Emeritus member of the Belize Institute of Archaeology. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Anthropology at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, and
Martijn van den Bel
After many archaeological wanderings in the Lesser Antilles, French Guiana, and The Netherlands between 1995 and 2004 Martijn (Haarlem 1971) now works as project leader for Inrap (the French National Institute for Compliance Archaeology) in the French Antilles and French Guiana, where he lives. Next to the archaeology of the latter regions, for which he earned a PhD title at Leiden University, The Netherlands, in 2015, he is also interested in the Dutch occupation and colonization of this particular area during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recently, he published two books on this matter: The Voyages of Adriaan van Berkel to Guiana (with Lodewijk Hulsman and Lodewijk Wagenaar; Sidestone Press, 2014) and Entre deux mondes. Amérindiens et Européens sur les côtes de Guyane, avant la colonie (1560–1627) (with Gérard Collomb; CTHS, 2014).
Mary Jane Berman
(PhD suny-Binghamton) is co-director of the Lucayan Ecological Archaeology Project, an interdisciplinary project studying the indigenous inhabitants of the Bahama archipelago. Berman has published extensively on the archaeology of the Lucayans, focusing on Lucayan agriculture, plant use, ceramics, lithics, and mobility and exchange. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Ohio, having rejoined the Faculty, after 15 years as director of the University’s Center for American and World Cultures.
Arie Boomert
studied cultural anthropology and cultural prehistory at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University, The Netherlands. He worked as an archaeologist at the Surinaams Museum, Paramaribo, Suriname, Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. In 2011 he retired as an Assistant Professor and Senior Researcher from the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is a Curatorial Affiliate in the Division of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, USA. In 2005 the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology awarded him a plaque ‘in recognition of years of dedicated service and commitment to the promotion and development of the Archaeology of Trinidad and Tobago.’
Jeb J. Card
is Visiting Assistant Professor and Assistant for Special Projects in the Department of Anthropology of Miami University, Ohio. He received his PhD from Tulane University in 2007. He specializes in historical archaeology, early colonialism, material culture hybridity, ethnogenesis, ceramic analysis, and pre-Hispanic Maya political history, working in Mesoamerica, chiefly in El Salvador. At the University of Miami, he also works on three-dimensional documentation and analysis of artifacts. He is editor of The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), co-editor of Lost City, Found Pyramid (with David S. Anderson; University of Alabama Press, 2016), and author of Spooky Archaeology: Myth and the Science of the Past (University of New Mexico Press, 2018).
Charles R. Cobb
is Curator and Lockwood Professor of Historical Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida. His research focuses on Native American engagements with European colonialism in southeastern North America. He has been involved in a sustained study of Indian towns and English forts on the Carolina frontier. In a collaborative project with the Chickasaw Nation, he is also exploring the complex interactions between the Chickasaw, English, Spanish, and French in Mississippi. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cobb is also developing an online archaeological database for the Franciscan missions of La Florida.
Gérard Collomb
is an anthropologist and Associated Researcher at the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain (EHESS/CNRS) and at the Centre Enseignement et recherche en ethnologie amérindienne (Université Paris Nanterre – CNRS) in Paris. His research interests include ethnohistory and political anthropology of Amerindians in French Guiana and Surinam during the colonial and post-colonial periods, focusing on the building processes of a multiethnic society in these two countries. He published Les Indiens de la Sinnamary. Journal du père Jean de la Mousse en Guyane (1684–1691) (Chandeigne, 2006) and Entre deux mondes. Amérindiens et Européens sur les côtes de Guyane, avant la colonie (1560–1627) (with Martijn van den Bel; CTHS, 2014).
Shannon Dugan Iverson
is an archaeologist specializing in the Aztec-to-colonial religious transition in central Mexico. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin, in 2015. From 2016–2017 she served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University. She currently works as a Senior User Experience Researcher at Daito Design in Austin, Texas.
Marlieke Ernst
is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Within the nexus1492 project, she focuses on ceramic material transformations. She investigates transcultural processes within intercultural communications at the islands of Hispaniola and Cubagua. The material reflection of this multicultural society and the agency of the enslaved and colonized are studied through the continuities and changes in the manufacture between precolonial and colonial non-European ceramics present at colonial sites. Both Amerindian (local and non-local), Spanish, and African presences are studied within the ceramic assemblages. Her study assesses the extent to which indigenous pottery traditions disappeared and the degree to which new techniques and forms appeared.
William R. Fowler
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University. He received a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Calgary in 1981. His principal research interests include historical archaeology, architecture, landscapes, colonialism, urbanism, migrations, and the Nahua cultures of Mesoamerica. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge University Press). He has directed the Ciudad Vieja Archaeological Project in El Salvador since 1996.
Perry L. Gnivecki
(PhD suny-Binghamton) is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Miami University, Hamilton, and the Department of Anthropology, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He is co-director of the Lucayan Archaeological Ecological Project. He has conducted excavations on numerous islands in the Bahamas and, for the last 15 years, has led the Department of Anthropology’s archaeology field school on San Salvador and Eleuthera islands. He has also conducted archaeological research in the USA and Middle East. His research has focused on colonial encounters and site formation processes. He is a member of the Register of Professional Archaeologists.
Christophe Helmke
is Associate Professor of American Indian Languages and Cultures at the Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the archaeology, epigraphy, iconography, and languages of Mesoamerica. Besides Maya archaeology and epigraphy, other research interests include the pre-Columbian use of caves, Mesoamerican writing systems, as well as rock art and comparative Amerindian mythology.
Shea Henry
(PhD Simon Fraser University 2018) recently completed her PhD researching the precontact and the contact-era transition in Jamaica. She has studied and worked in the field of historical and contact-era archaeology for the past 12 years, focusing on zooarchaeological evidence of the change in diet over time and the intersection of diet and culture. She is currently focusing on the realm of heritage and public education as the curator of the Maple Ridge Museum.
Gilda Hernández Sánchez
was Adjunct Researcher at the Department of Anthropology, Leiden University, The Netherlands, from 2000 to 2010. Her previous work focused on the analysis of pictographic decoration on ancient and present-day ceramic vessels found in Mexico. She has published in various journals such as Journal de la Société des Américanistes, Mexicon, and Latin American Antiquity. At present she teaches Spanish and History in Germany.
Corinne L. Hofman
is Professor of Caribbean Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Hofman has conducted fieldwork throughout the Caribbean over the past 30 years (together with Menno Hoogland). Her research and publications are highly multi-disciplinary and major themes of interest center around mobility and exchange, colonial encounters, inter-cultural dynamics, settlement archaeology, artifact analyses, and provenance studies. Hofman’s projects are designed to contribute to the historical awareness, valorization of archaeological heritage, and knowledge exchange in the Caribbean. Since 1998, Hofman has obtained numerous research grants and prizes, including the erc-Synergy Grant for the nexus1492 project in 2012. Her recent publications include Managing our Past into the Future: Archaeological Heritage Management in the Dutch Caribbean (with Jay B. Haviser; Sidestone Press, 2015) and The Caribbean Before Columbus (with William F. Keegan; Oxford University Press, 2017).
Menno L.P. Hoogland
is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Hoogland studied cultural anthropology in Leiden with a focus on prehistory and physical anthropology and wrote his PhD thesis on settlement patterns of the Amerindian population of Saba, Netherlands Antilles. He is an expert in archaeothanatology and Caribbean archaeology. Hoogland’s research focuses on the funerary practices of precolonial and early colonial Amerindian societies in the Caribbean and the application of taphonomical methods for the reconstruction of funerary behaviour. He was PI of the NWO project Houses for the Living and the Dead. Currently he is a Senior Researcher in the erc-Synergy project nexus1492 at Leiden University.
Rosemary A. Joyce
is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1985. As curator and faculty member at Harvard University from 1985 to 1994, she moved to Berkeley in 1994, and served as Director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology until 1999. She began participating in archaeological fieldwork in Honduras as an undergraduate in 1977, and co-directed projects on early village life, the Classic period, and the colonial and Republican periods. While collaborating in research in the western Maya area with Mexican colleagues, she continues research on Honduran collections in museums.
Floris W.M. Keehnen
is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Funded by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), he investigates indigenous Caribbean attitudes towards European-introduced material culture in early colonial times (AD 1492–1550). His research interests include the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Caribbean, indigenous value systems, colonial encounters, and trade and exchange.Luis A. Lemoine Buffetis President of the arca-Arqueología del Caribe Foundation and Researcher at Unidad de Estudios Arqueológicos (usb) in Caracas, Venezuela. He has a degree in Archaeology from the University of Leicester, UK (2005). Lemoine Buffet has more than 15 years of field archaeology experience in Venezuela and abroad. In 2008, he discovered several Archaic Age sites on Margarita Island where, since then, he has been conducting fieldwork together with a team from the Archaeology Research Unit (usb) and Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (ivic), Venezuela. He specializes in osteoarchaeology of human remains including isotopic analysis, aDNA studies, and musculoskeletal biomechanics analysis.
John Angus Martin
is an Archivist, Researcher, and Historian, specializing in Grenadian history, and European colonization and slavery in the Caribbean. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Heritage Management at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He holds Master’s degrees in History and Agricultural and Applied Economics from Clemson University, South Carolina. He is the author of A-Z of Grenada Heritage (2007) and Island Caribs and French Settlers in Grenada, 1498–1763 (2013). He also co-authored The Temne Nation of Carriacou: Sierra Leone’s Lost Family in the Caribbean (with Joseph Opala and Cynthia Schmidt; Polyphemus Press, 2016) and co-edited Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–83 (with Nicole Phillip-Dowe; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).
Clay Mathers
is the Executive Director of the Coronado Institute, a registered non-profit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focused on investigating and preserving early historic sites in the Western US. Mathers is a professional archaeologist with a PhD in Iberian Prehistory (University of Sheffield, UK), a MPhil in GIS and Remote Sensing (University of Cambridge, UK), and a BA in Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania). He has worked on numerous Vázquez de Coronado sites in New Mexico and has published widely on early entradas in the US Southwest, including two recent edited volumes: Native and Spanish New Worlds (with Jeffrey M. Mitchem and Charles M. Haecker; University of Arizona Press, 2013), and The Destiny of Their Manifests (University Press of Florida, forthcoming).
Maxine Oland
is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her archaeological research is focused on the Maya people of Belize from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, their interactions with European and other indigenous groups, and their eventual incorporation into the global economy. Her work on the early colonial Maya has been published in Antiquity, the International Journal of Historic Archaeology, Lithic Technology, and several edited volumes. She is co-editor of Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/ Colonial Transitions in Archaeology (with Siobhan M. Hart and Liam Frink; University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Alberto Sarcina
is an archaeologist, graduated from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, with postgraduate studies at the same University. He currently is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. He has twenty years of experience as a field archaeologist in Italy and is specialized in stratigraphy and archaeological graphical documentation. He teaches Methods and Techniques of Archaeological Research at the Faculty of Heritage Studies at the Externado University, Bogotá. He is Researcher of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH) and Coordinator of the Archaeological and Historical Park of Santa María de la Antigua del Darién. Since 2013, he has directed the archaeological works in Santa María de la Antigua del Darién (Colombia), which led to the recognition and delimitation of the city and the declaration of it as a Heritage of Cultural Interest of the Nation.
Russell N. Sheptak
is Research Associate at the Archaeological Research Facility of the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands, in 2013. His dissertation was a study of indigenous continuity in Honduras from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. He conducted his first archaeological fieldwork in Meadowcroft rock shelter and has contributed to Honduran archaeology since 1980, working in archaeological sites that date from the earliest settled villages through to the twentieth century. His main research interest is in indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples in colonial-period Honduras.
Roberto Valcárcel Rojas
is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden University (erc-Synergy nexus1492) and Visiting Professor at the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology, Dominican Republic. His main research interests are cultural interaction, indigenous social organization in the Caribbean, and archaeology and history of the early colonial times in the Americas. He specifically focuses on the study of the Indian as a colonial category. Dr. Valcárcel Rojas is author of several books and articles about Cuban and Caribbean precolonial and colonial archaeology including Archaeology of Early Colonial Interaction at El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba (University Press of Florida, 2016).
Robyn Woodward
(PhD Simon Fraser University 2006) is an Adjunct Professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University. She is also a trustee and governor of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and the vice-president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA). She has worked as an underwater archaeologist at the pirate city of Port Royal, Jamaica, and as an archaeologist and conservator on various INA projects in Turkey and the Yukon Territories, Canada. She has directed the excavation program at the site of Sevilla la Nueva, in Jamaica since 2001.