People
Bridging People, Sharing History
Sandra Montón Subías
Principal Investigator in ABERIGUA and co-director of the San Dionisio’s excavations at Humåtak (Guåhån)
Sandra is a feminist archaeologist endeavoring how gender, past and present, is constructed. She currently investigates modern colonial situations, but she has traditionally focused on the archaeology of the Bronze Age Mediterranean. She is also PI in the Project GenderGLOBAL. From Prehistory to early modernity in the Marina Islands and head of the research groups on Colonialism, Gender, Materialities and on Social Archaeology and Gender Studies.
Sandra is an ICREA en la Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, España) Here, he teaches “Archaeology of Colonialism. Past and Present” and “Gender, Sexuality, and Diversity”. Sandra lives in Barcelona with her son Pau and her pug Perla.
Natalia Moragas
Codirector of ABERIGUA excavations at San Dionisio.
Natalia is an archaeologist interested in processes of cultural change between two different societies through the study of material culture. Much of her research is developed in central Mexico studying the processes of cultural change between the pre-Hispanic era and the early colonial period. She is also member of ABERIGUA, where she co-directs archaeological excavations at San Dionisio in Humåtak (Guåhån). Natalia is a Fellow Serra Hunter Associate Professor of the Department of History and Archeology of the University of Barcelona She spends her free time travelling, reading and volunteering for the Red Cross.
James M. Bayman
2017 and 1018 co-director of ABERIGUA excavations at San Dionisio.
Jim’s archaeological research focuses on colonialism and technological change in traditional Pacific island societies, including Hawaii and the Manislan Mariånas. His decades of archaeological research in southwestern North America provide him a comparative perspective on the consequences of Spanish and American colonialism for indigenous communities. Jim is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa (Honolulu, Hawaiʻi) where he teaches anthropological archaeology, and he directs field training programs in community-based archaeology. Jim lives in Honolulu with his spouse and their teenage daughter. Jim was co-director of 2017 and 2018 excavations at San Dionisio.
Joe E. Quinata
Coordinator of community archaeology program and relationship with SHIPO.
Joe E. Quinata grew up in the heritage village of Humåtak, Guåhån and is currently the Chairman and founder of the Humatak Community Foundation. Mr. Quinata started his career in preservation about 30 years ago when he opened the office of the the Guåhån Preservation Trust, a non-profit, public corporation and the only organization of its kind in the Micronesian region. Mr. Quinata is considered a pioneer in heritage preservation on Guåhån as he has spearheaded the restoration and preservation of significant places that matter to the people of Guåhån. Under the Guåhån Preservation Trust, he championed the legal fight to preserve and protect Pågat village, Guåhån’s sacred ancestral sites, from the U.S. Military’s plan to build live firing ranges on the sites.
Joe Quinata was appointed as Trustee member and Chairman of the Advisor group of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He is a founding member of the Asian and Pacific Islanders American for Historic Presevation and the National Preservation Partners Network, both national public corporations.
Joe shares his passion for heritage preservation through his writings, lectures, and storytelling in the community, university, and professional development sessions. He is a conflict resolution mediator and board member of Inafa’Maolek Mediation Center. He has earned is undergratuate and graduate degrees in business administration at the University of Guåhån.
Omaira Brunal-Perry, MA, JD
Research Member in ABERIGUA.
Omaira Brunal-Perry, MA, JD earned a juris doctorate from Universidad Libre, Bogota, Colombia, and a M.A. in Library Science from Syracuse University, New York. She also received a certificate from the U.S. National Archives – Modern Archives Institute, 2005. Currently, she is an associate professor at the RFT Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guåhån. Brunal-Perry also serves as the Spanish legal historiographer and curator of the Spanish Documents Collection and Manuscripts Collection at MARC. Her research interest is on documents related to the colonial Spanish administration in the Manislan Mariånas and Caroline Islands. Brunal-Perry has done extensive archival research in Mexico, the Philippines, Spain, and the US. In addition, she directed the project “The Spanish Language Judicial Records of Guåhån.” She has published several articles and books.
Council of State Archivists CoSA – Membership
Lourdes Prados Torreira
Research Member in ABERIGUA.
Is full Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Her fields of research have focused on Mediterranean Protohistory specially connected with Iberian Archaeology, rituality and sacred spaces, endorsed with different publications on the analysis of Iberian religiosity. She has also strengthened the theoretical and methodological application of Gender and Feminist archaeology in studies on Iberian Protohistory. Her publications, in this aspect have focused on the study of Iberian women from different perspectives. She is interested in understanding the role of women and children in religous practices. In recent years her interest has also been oriented to include the gender perspective in archaeological museums, with various internationals publications and leading the R-D: “Discrimination against women: the origins of the problema. The social and educational role of Archaeological Museums against gender violence (2013-2016) (M. Trabajo y AA.SS.).
Since 2018 she is a member of the Archaeological Spanish Research Team Aberigua doing research on the Island of Guåhån. She is also one of the curators of the exhibition Let´s go around the world. The CHamorru Culture: identity and archaeology in Guåhån. (Museo Nacional de Antropología Madrid. September 2021.
Laura Trellisó Carreño
Research Member in ABERIGUA
PhD in History and researcher at the Archaeology Laboratory at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. Laura is an osteoarcheologist whose research focuses on the reconstruction and interpretation of a given population’s way of life through the analysis of human remains in archaeological contexts. She has been part of the Tyre Project since 1997 and is responsible for the study of the skeletal remains of the Phoenician cemetery of Al-Bass (Lebanon). In 2018 she joined the ABERIGUA project and since 2019 she has been an integral part of the Colonialism, Gender and Materialities (CGyM) project.
Laura also coordinates a workshop for young people (From the archaeological excavation to the laboratory) which is designed to bring archaeological research closer to the secondary school community and promote a greater knowledge of historical and cultural heritage.
Boyd Dixon
Research Member in ABERIGUA
Boyd Dixon is a Senior Archaeologist for the Cardno GS and SEARCH offices in Guåhån and the CNMI and lives in Chalan Pago with two boonie dogs. With over 30 years of archaeological experience in the Manislan Mariånas, Hawai`i, and the Asian-Pacific his interests embrace the many people, places, and stories shared with him, both old and new. In 2019 he received the Northern Marianas Humanities Council Governor’s Humanities Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities.
Verónica Peña Filiu
Research Member in ABERIGUA
Verónica Peña Filiu is a historian interested in the role of food in early modern cross-cultural encounters and the configuration of new foodways in colonial situations. She has been doctoral fellow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and the Leibniz-Institute of European History (Mainz, Germany). Verónica holds a PhD in History from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2020), and she has recently been awarded a short-term fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, United States).
Verónica has conducted archival research in Spain, Italy, Mexico, and Guåhån. She has participated in archaeological campaigns in Guåhån (2017 and 2018) within the framework of the project ABERIGUA (Archaeology of Iberian Contact and Colonialism in Guåhån). At Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Verónica has taught undergraduate courses on modern history and graduate courses on the history of the Asia-Pacific region.
Enrique Moral de Eusebio
Research Member in ABERIGUA
Enrique Moral de Eusebio is a Margarita Salas postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d’Història de la Ciència, UAB. He combines approaches and methodologies from History, Anthropology and Archaeology to explore the role that sexuality and sexual encounters played in the Spanish colonization of Tåno’ Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana Islands) between the 16th and 18th centuries. From a transfeminist stance and following anti-colonial authors, his research focuses on the interrelationship between sexuality and power, emphasizing its most public, strategic and conflictive aspects, such as ethnosexual violence and resistance.
Carmen Á. Granell
Research Member in ABERIGUA
Degree in Archaeology at the Complutense University of Madrid and pre-doctoral researcher (FPU Fellow) in History at the Pompeu Fabra University. In her research project, “Scrutinizing the materialities of the Manislan Mariånas (1500 BCE – 1898 CE): transgenerational learning as a historical dynamic of communitarian re-existence”, she addresses her main historical concerns: (1) the urgency of measures for the historical repair of colonialism in the former European metropolises; (2) the tracking of the dynamics of resistance and resilience to the colonial globalization of ageism and ableism; and (3) the relevance of an ethical, public, collaborative and pedagogical historical knowledge. Carmen is also a member of the Colonialism, Gender and Materialities (CGyM) research group and of the Editorial Board of Entremons magazine.
Aurora Muriente Pastrana
Research Member in ABERIGUA
auroramaria.muriente01@estudiant.upf.edu
Puerto Rican archaeologist and student of the PhD Program in History from the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, as part of the Cultural Contact and Iberian Colonialism in Guåhån Archeology project (ABERIGUA). Her doctoral research is titled “Comparison of the impact of Spanish colonialism on clothing and on the development and production of textiles in the pre-Hispanic societies of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Guåhån“.
Aurora completed a degree in Journalism and Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). After that, she completed an Inter-university Master in Classical Archeology directed by the Catalan Institute of Classical Archeology, the Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In addition, she studied a semester at the Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Italy. During her master’s degree, she participated in numerous excavations at Roman and Greek cultures sites, including the excavation of the temple of the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus at Tarragona’s Cathedral in 2010. In 2013, she participated in different archaeological projects of the Mayan culture in southern Mexico directed by the Institute of Anthropological Research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Department of Anthropology from the University of Kentucky. Later, Aurora was a collaborator with the Archeology and Ethnohistory Program of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture work team, as well as with the Council of Terrestrial Archeology of Puerto Rico, and participated in the rehabilitation project of Caguana Indigenous Ceremonial Park, in the municipality of Utuado, which corresponds to the Caribbean, Taino culture. In the summer of 2019, she participated with the ABERIGUA team in the excavation campaign at the San Dionisio site, Umatac, Guåhån.
Since 2017, Aurora has been a Humanities and Social Sciences professor at the General Studies Faculty at the UPR.
Yvonne R. Ramírez Corredor
Research Member in ABERIGUA
Yvonne R. Ramirez Corredor is an Anthropology graduate from National University of Colombia, MA in Archaeology from the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and MA in History of Science from Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is currently a student in PhD History program at Pompeu Fabra University. She is also interested in the changes and continuities in the construction of colonial spaces associated to the incorporation of Guåhån and the Manislan Mariånas (western Pacific) to the colonial network of the Spanish Empire, encompasing broader topics related to materialities, heritage, gender, ethnicity and colonialism.
Matilde Carbajo
Research Member in ABERIGUA
Matilde Carbajo obtained a bachelor in Archaeology at the University Complutense of Madrid and a bachelor in Cultural Anthropology at Lumière Lyon 2 University. She is currently doing her PhD at the Pompeu Fabra University, as part of the Colonialism, Gender and Materialities (CGyM) research group. Her research project is entitled: “Ailment and remedy: continuity and change in healing practices and public health in the Manislan Mariånas (Western Pacific) (900AD – 1898AD)”.
She is interested in exploring the nature/culture dichotomy and (1) how western colonists exported and imposed this dichotomy through colonial strategies, (2) how this dichotomy is perpetuated today, including in our perception of cultural and natural heritage, and (3) how this perception constitutes the basis for our identity formation.
Noelia Villena Rodríguez
Research Member in ABERIGUA.
Noelia V. Rodríguez is an Archaeolgy graduate (Universidad de Granada) and MA in History (Universidad de Granada) and MA in Education (Universidad de Granada). She is currently a student in PhD History program at Pompeu Fabra University. . Her research project is entitled: “Gazes from and towards the ocean in the Mariana Islands (Western Pacific). Perceptions, representations and appropriations in the context of Spanish contact and colonisation (1521- 1898).” Her main interests include: The perception of the sea, the representation and apropiation of the seascapes through the comerce and the establishment of a marine colony and the impact of the colonialism in the relationship with the sea.
Enric Castillo Hidalgo
Research Member in ABERIGUA.
Enric Castillo Hidalgo is a history graduate from the University of Granada and has an MA in World History from Pompeu Fabra University. He is currently a student in the PhD History Program at Pompeu Fabra University. His doctoral research concerns the colonisation of the Mariana Islands, focusing on the construction of the colonial empire in the Islands, and the effects that colonisation had on the Chamorro population. He is especially interested in the colonisers’ perception of the Chamorro people, as well as how the colonisers imposed their cultures on the native population.
