Dr. Joanna Ostapkowicz

Joanna Ostapkowicz is Research Associate in Caribbean Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on bringing a wide span of analytical techniques to better understand the chronological range, materials and provenance of Caribbean artefacts in museum collections. She has been Principal Investigator on several international, multi-disciplinary research projects that focus on Caribbean sculpture and bridge the arts and sciences, including Pre-Hispanic Caribbean Sculptural arts in Wood (supported by the Getty Foundation and British Academy), Black Pitch, Carved Histories: Prehistoric wood sculpture from Trinidad’s Pitch Lake (the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC], UK) and SIBA: Stone Interchanges in the Bahama Archipelago (AHRC).

More broadly, her interests span the indigenous arts of the Americas, from the Northwest Coast of North America to Florida and, most recently, to north-eastern South America with the jagWARS project (Jaguars, Raptors and the Patterns of War, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung). Her recent volumes are Iconography and Wetsite Archaeology of Florida’s Watery Realms (2019, University of Florida Press, co-edited with Ryan Wheeler), Real, Recent or Replica: Precolumbian Caribbean Heritage as Art, Commodity, and Inspiration (2021, University of Alabama Press, co-edited with Jonathan A. Hanna) and Lucayan Legacies (2023, Sidestone Press).