Jean-Paul Rojas

Graduate Student

Hailing from Miami, Florida, with roots in Rivas, Nicaragua, and Cali, Colombia, Jean-Paul is an archaeologist with broad training in anthropology and the cultural patrimony of Latin America and the Caribbean. He received his B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Latin American and Latinx Studies from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Currently, Jean-Paul is an NSF-GRFP Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (LACX). Through his current research, Jean-Paul investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial maritime mobility, interregional interaction and long-distance exchange, craft and pottery production practices, and social identities along Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast and across Central America, northern South America, the Antilles, and the circum-Caribbean more broadly.

 

Over the years, Jean-Paul has been a contributing member of various international research projects and training programs. In 2021, as part of his anthropological studies at the School for International Training (SIT) in Quito, Ecuador, Jean-Paul conducted ethnographic research on the link between ancestral gastronomy, community-based tourism, and environmental conservation practices at the comuna ancestral of Las Tunas in Manabí, Ecuador. Between 2021–2022, as part of the Proyecto Arqueológico Machaca-Desaguadero (PAMD), Jean-Paul contributed as a satellite imagery and geographic information systems (GIS) researcher, investigating human-environmental relationships to understand how historical and contemporary Uru, Aymara, and Quechua communities of the Bolivian-Peruvian altiplano experienced changes in the waterscape of the upper Desaguadero River basin. Jean-Paul’s work with the PAMD directly contributed to his undergraduate honor’s thesis entitled “River Change and Community Continuity: Contextualizing Long-term Occupation of the Upper Desaguadero River”. In 2022, as part of the Proyecto Arqueológico del los Ríos Culebra-Colín (PARCC), Jean-Paul participated in ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in collaboration with the comuna ancestral of Dos Mangas in Santa Elena, Ecuador, studying Valdivia and Manteño social processes at the archaeological site of Buen Suceso and documenting the contemporary heritage and oral histories of the local community. In 2023, as part of the Proyecto Regional de Palenque (PREP), Jean-Paul participated in household archaeology in the pre-Hispanic urban neighborhoods of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, in collaboration with members of the Ch'ol Maya community. As part of his academic formation and training in archaeometric methods, Jean-Paul has also participated in the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE) Summer Intensive in Ceramic Petrography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Currently, Jean-Paul is the principal investigator and director of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Municipio de Corn Island (PAMCI) and is one of the co-founders of the Corn Islands Virtual Museum. Through the PAMCI, Jean-Paul has led two seasons of community-collaborative archaeological fieldwork in collaboration with the various multilingual, multiethnic Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and mestizo communities of Great Corn Island and Little Corn Island, and has collaborated with various local Nicaraguan entities such as the Museo Histórico de la Costa Caribe del Centro de Investigaciones de la Costa Caribe-Atlántica de Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University (CIDCCA-BICU), the Casa de Cultura y Creatividad “Charles Hodgson Downs” de Corn Island, and the Corn Islands Virtual Library. As part of his role with the Corn Island Virtual Museum, Jean-Paul specializes in curating the exhibition “Echoes of Our First Peoples: The Pre-Colonial Era”, which pays homage to the rich history and heritage of the Macro-Chibchan speaking Kukra and their Afro-Indigenous Creole descendants.