ISLANDLIVES will be the first interdisciplinary historical archaeological project to deploy a broad array of cutting-edge archaeological
science techniques to study everyday life at multiple sites across multiple islands during a span of 229 years. The Dutch islands of
Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire (ABC islands) were unconventional colonies that did not fit the typical European model of plantationdriven
modernity incepted in the Caribbean. Rather, they occupied a grey area, thriving on illicit trade with the Spanish mainland.
Truly little, however, is known archaeologically about everyday life on the islands. By mobilizing terrestrial and maritime
archaeological investigations, archival research, and archaeometric, proteomic, archaeobotanical, collagen fingerprinting, and
zooarchaeological analyses within a sophisticated conceptual framework, the project aims to reveal the inner workings of alternative
modernities in the 17th- through 19th-century Southern Caribbean. The bulk of evidence will be obtained through archaeological
excavations at six sites, the careful interpretation of which will generate the first comprehensive cross-section of everyday lives across
the ABC islands. Archaeometric analyses will, moreover, provide unprecedented clarity on the provenance and dating of poorly
identified European and regional ceramics ubiquitous on the islands and in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean regions. This project
is therefore geared to advance research on how different island peoples including free and enslaved blacks, indigenous people,
Sephardim, and Dutch navigated modernity in their own contested and contingent ways. Finally, these new understandings will be
productively engaged with the present. In this way ISLANDLIVES also aims to reveal how insights from past alternative modernities
can help us better understand contemporary ABC-island societies and, ultimately, critically challenge deep-rooted Eurocentric
narratives about the past in the present