Native Raizal Heritage: Landscape Utilization and Cultural Patrimony on Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands, Colombia (1629–Present)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

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, resource extraction, and military action since 1629, when the English Puritan venture capitalists of the Providence Island Company—whose shareholders also held stakes in the Virginia Company—financed the primary colonization of Old Providence and Santa Catalina in 1629, one year after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what was to become the United States of America. Slaves were initially brought to the islands in 1633, and in 1638 those slaves, with the assistance of Maroons who were living on the southwest side of Old Providence Island, staged the first revolt in the English Americas. The islands are still occupied by descendants of the original English Puritan colonists, enslaved Africans, and self-emancipated Africans, who established a coterminous Maroon colony that included peoples of Indigenous and European descent fleeing the colonial industrial complex, and who now identify collectively as Raizal. In her presentation, Dr. Mayfield explores Native Raizal heritage—both tangible and intangible—through the lens of enduring forms of landscape utilization and discrete types of cultural patrimony.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38376.0