Courtney Michelle Besaw

COURTNEY BESAW, then a graduate student at University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was awarded a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “Marronage in the Western Caribbean: Material Culture and Change on the Island of Providencia,” supervised by Dr. Marc Bermann. This archaeological research was conducted on the island of Providencia, Colombia to better understand the Maroons that lived there, groups of formerly enslaved people who self-emancipated to live free of colonial rule. Spanish documents state that the island was abandoned during the late 17th and 18th centuries by colonial powers, but this archaeological research supports local oral histories in challenging these documents. This previously documented “period of abandonment” is better understood as a “Maroon period” as the only permanent residents on the island were the Maroons. Three Maroon sites were documented, surface collected, and excavated and likely represent single-family rural homesteads. Major findings include high proportions of imported materials that would have been traded to them by outsiders and the presence of colonoware (locally produced African diasporic pottery). These findings document a very different Maroon lifeway than has been studied archaeologically elsewhere.