Cristian Figueroa (he/him/Él) is a curator of the Echoes of Our First People: Pre-colonial Era exhibit at The Corn Islands Virtual Museum and a research associate of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Municipio de Corn Island (PAMCI). He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Archaeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, investigating questions related to shifting social identities across time as a result of interregional interaction and migration. Cristian earned an Associate of Arts degree in Liberal Arts, focusing on Social and Behavioral Sciences, from the College of the Sequoias, and he holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology with Distinction from the University of California, Berkeley.
Cristian's research
interests and experiences encompasses a broad range of topics across the
Americas. His previous experiences include examining early colonial archives
from Central America and analyzing excavation records and lithic artifacts from
Honduras. He has investigated questions related to social identity and physical
landscapes through ethnographic and community-collaborative archaeological
excavations in the Santa Elena province of Ecuador (Proyecto Arqueológico de
los Ríos Culebra-Colín) and has conducted urban household excavations at the
UNESCO World Heritage site of Palenque, México (Proyecto Regional de Palenque).
Cristian has also served as a field excavation supervisor, leading
archaeological excavations that focused on the late Classic collapse of the Río
Viejo polity in the coast of Oaxaca, México (Río Verde Archaeological Project).
Furthermore, Cristian has served as the Project Spanish Translator for the 2016
Río Verde Settlement Project.
Cristian is currently engaged in three long-term projects. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theories and methodologies from anthropological archaeology, ethnohistory, art history, museum studies, and Indigenous studies, he is developing a research project in collaboration with the Native Comcáac community and the Museo Comcáac in Sonora, México. One of the primary objectives of this project is to research how social identity is influenced by interregional interaction and migration and the landscape. Additionally, the project seeks to explore how contemporary cultural identity can promote the acceptance of diverse social identities, including transnational, Indigenous, sexuality and gender identities. His second project as a collaborator of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Municipio de Corn Island (PAMCI), seeks to understand shifting social identities along Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast as a result of interregional interaction, migration, and exchange. More specifically, Cristian seeks to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to understand the human-animal interactions, and how early inhabitants across this region used day-to-day domestic and specialized artifacts to express their relation to non-human living beings. The third project entails the development of the Echoes of Our First People: Pre-colonial Era exhibit at the Corn Islands Virtual Museum to facilitate access of the Corn Islands cultural heritage to the local community, the greater diaspora of Corn Isleños, the general public, and the researchers and academics of the greater Isthmo-Colombian and Caribbean regions.