Tracie Mayfield

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Dr. Mayfield’s current research centers on colonial-period, island and coastal settlements in the Western Caribbean from the Yucatán to South America, along the Miskito Coast. Her work seeks to better understand localized strategies for negotiating the intricate relationships between and among variable stakeholders embedded within the colonial-industrial complex, including European governments, military, & industrialists; Indigenous peoples; labor populations (pre- and post-emancipated peoples of African descent, tenant farmers, market & agricultural workers, and indentured servants); and loosely affiliated groups such as Maroons, pirates, buccaneers, and privateers. An important aspect of her community-based research aims to identify the effects of rapidly fluctuating military and administrative power structures on the movement and organization of materials, ideas, and built-environments during the colonial period and how diverse -yet connected- culture histories inform the structures of everyday life for the groups and individuals who currently inhabit these locations.

Research Keywords

Colombia, Belize, Caribbean, Mesoamerica, Central America, and South America, anthropological archaeology, archaeologies of colonialism (including slavery and marronage), heritage studies, community-led archaeology, zooarchaeology, ceramic analysis, ethnography, ethnohistory

Research Specialties

Colombia, Belize, Caribbean, Mesoamerica, Central America, and South America, anthropological archaeology, archaeologies of colonialism (including slavery and marronage), heritage studies, community-led archaeology, zooarchaeology, ceramic analysis, ethnography, ethnohistory

Detailed Statement of Research Interests

The Old Providence and Santa Catalina Archaeological Project (OPSCIAP)

Decolonizing Native Raizal Heritage:

Ethnoarchaeology on Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands, Colombia

The islands of Old Providence and Santa Catalina -located 130 miles east 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 Native Raizal descendants of the original colonists, African slaves, and members of a coterminous Maroon village of self-emancipated peoples, to this day. The 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 and sent the first settlers to the Islands via the Seaflower, sister ship to the Mayflower –one year after the Company founded of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Virginia Company was one of the first to enter the American slave market, starting in 1619, when their ship the Treasurer, commanded by Daniel Elfrith, docked in Virginia several days after the first slaves arrived on the White Lion.  

Slaves were initially brought to the Islands in 1633, and in 1638 those slaves, with the assistance of self-emancipated Maroons who were living on the southwest side of Old Providence Island, staged the first revolt in the English Americas. After settling the Islands in 1629, colonists under the direction of the Providence Island Company spent the next few years constructing an administrative center (the Town of New Westminster) and several forts, along with establishing dispersed, plantation-household groups known as ‘families’ that were supervised by a ‘father’ and comprised of wealthy Company investors, apprentices hoping to establish their own plantations one day by making enough money to buy into the Company, and enslaved Africans. Over time, the area surrounding the original town, along with the plantation-household groups and at least one Maroon settlement -which has been archaeologically and ethnographically verified- evolved into distinct neighborhoods that still exist today. 

In 1635, the Spanish made a failed attempt to take the Islands but were successful in driving out the English in 1641, although the majority of non-administrative or military residents remained in residence. Around 20 years later (1666), the infamous privateer Henry Morgan (along with his entire fleet) took the Islands from the Spanish and used the space to prepare for an attack on Panama in 1671. The remaining inhabitants of Old Providence and Santa Catalina continued living on the Islands –under self-administration– until 1786 when Francis Archbold (English) received the Spanish Crown’s permission to settle with his family and a few others on the south side of Old Providence. However, the settlers were ordered to leave in 1810; again leaving the permanent residents under nominal, if any, outside administrative or military oversight. In 1818, a French privateer named Luis Aury made the Islands a base of operations for his multinational and multi-ethnic privateering fleet. After his sudden death in 1822 there was a public meeting where the Islanders voted –although it is unclear exactly who voted because the original document has been lost– to recognize the Constitution of Cúcuta and thus joined the Republic of Gran Colombia, under which the Islands remain to this day. 

There was minimal administrative involvement from the mainland until 1903 when the Maria Immaculata Convent and School was established by the Oblate Sisters of Providence; the “first congregation of Catholic women of African descent to take vows in the Americas” (Montgomery 2006 p. 50). The Maria Immaculata Convent and School was only in operation for two years, 1903-1905, but the building continued to be used as a church until 2020 when the building was destroyed by Hurricane Iota. 

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the Islands have seen significant changes, due in large part to the influx of people from the mainland who have settled there, an increasing reliance on tourism as the main source of capital in the wake of decreased homesteading (which had dominated sociocultural organization for the majority of the Islands’ history); and the arrival of electricity, the construction of an airport, and the installation of a paved circum-navicular road in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, the population of Old Providence and Santa Catalina has grown from around 800 to close to 6,000 in 2023. 

The Old Providence and Santa Catalina Archaeological Project utilizes a variety of methods –archaeology, ethnography, geophysical survey, artifact and faunal analysis, and more— to better understand the Islands’ historical timeline and elucidate localized strategies utilized by Native Raizal, over time, to negotiate the intricate relationships between and among variable stakeholders embedded within the colonial- and modern-industrial complexes, including European colonists, venture-capitalists, and military; Indigenous groups; pre- and post-emancipated peoples of African descent; tenant farmers, agricultural workers, and indentured apprentices and servants; and more loosely affiliated, historically-connected groups such as Maroons, pirates, buccaneers, and privateers.

For copies of summer field research site reports see: https://usc.academia.edu/TracieDMayfieldPhD

For more information about student field school opportunities see: https://ifrglobal.org/program/colombia-providence-island/