Dr. Alice Samson

Position:
  • lecturer and researcher in Caribbean archaeology


Telephone number: +31 (0)71 527 2388
E-Mail: a.v.m.samson@arch.leidenuniv.nl
Faculty / Department: Faculteit Archeologie, Caribbean and Amazonia
Office Address: WSD
Reuvensplaats 3-4
2311 BE Leiden
Room number 114


Alice V.M. Samson (1977) is lecturer and researcher in Caribbean archaeology. She read Modern and Medieval languages at Clare College, Cambridge (BA hons, 2001). In 2005 she moved to Leiden to complete an MA in Northwest European prehistory (cum laude) and from 2005 to 2009 she became immersed in the more tropical setting of the Caribbean as a member of the research project Houses for the Living and the Dead (PI Menno L.P. Hoogland, NWO-funded).

The archaeological household and community were the topics of this research. Alice collected data for her dissertation, in collaboration with the Museo del Hombre Dominicano, with a field team from Leiden University, through archaeological fieldwork on the site of El Cabo, a precolumbian and contact-period settlement on the east coast of the Dominican Republic. Additionally she was PI for two seasons of geophysical prospection in El Cabo in collaboration with Dr Branko Mušič (Department of Archaeology, Ljubljana University, National Geographic Society-funded). The interpretation and presentation of settlement features in El Cabo formed the core of Alice's dissertation (PhD April 2010), which provides an archaeological definition of the precolumbian indigenous (“Taíno”) house and narrates 700 years of village history up to and after European colonisation.

Alice has published on ongoing fieldwork, Caribbean household and settlement archaeology and iconography in the Greater Antilles, as well as on the European Bronze Age. Her current research interests include household and social archaeology in the Caribbean and surrounding area, the material culture heritage of the Dominican Republic and Haiti and the inter-disciplinary application of bio-psychological approaches in archaeology (in collaboration with Dr Bridget Waller, Department of Psychology, Portsmouth University).

Last Modified: 09-03-2012