Jean-Paul Rojas is one of the co-founders of the Corn Islands Virtual Museum and is Responsible for the Area of Archaeology of the Virtual Museum. He is the principal investigator and director of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Municipio de Corn Island (PAMCI). He is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the cultural heritage and archaeology of Latin America and the Caribbean. As part of the Corn Islands Virtual Museum, Jean-Paul specializes in the curation of the Echoes of Our First People: Pre-colonial Era Exhibition.
Hailing from the tropical, multilingual metropolis of Miami, Florida—the geographic and cultural “Gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean”—with strong roots in Rivas, Nicaragua, and Cali, Colombia, Jean-Paul prides himself in celebrating interculturalism and diverse histories and heritages. He received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeology and a minor in Latin American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Through his post-secondary education, Jean-Paul has also studied anthropology through the School for International Training (SIT) in Quito, Ecuador, and 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 Boston, Massachusetts. He is currently a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) student in Anthropology with a specialization in archaeology and Latin American and Caribbean studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. As a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University and director of the PAMCI, Jean-Paul investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial maritime mobility, interregional interaction and long-distance exchange, 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. 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, specifically how historic and contemporary Indigenous Uru, Aymara, and Quechua communities experience the changing waterscape of the upper Desaguadero River of the Bolivian and Peruvian altiplano. This work directly contributed to his undergraduate Honors Thesis entitled "River Change and Community Continuity: Contextualizing Long-term Occupation of the Upper Desaguadero River". During his time studying at the SIT, Jean-Paul wrote an ethnographic monograph on environmental conservation, ancestral foodways, and community-based tourism in the comuna ancestral Las Tunas in Manabí, Ecuador, while simultaneously volunteering in sea turtle and ecological preservation initiatives with the Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco and the Centro de Rehabilitación de Fauna Marina del Parque Nacional Machalilla. As part of the Proyecto Arqueológico de los Ríos Culebra-Colín (PARCC) Jean-Paul engaged in community-collaborative ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork studying the pre-Hispanic Valdivia and Manteño cultures of coastal Ecuador and documenting the contemporary heritage of the comuna ancestral of Dos Mangas in Santa Elena, Ecuador. As part of the Proyecto Regional de Palenque (PREP), Jean-Paul engaged in household archaeology of pre-Hispanic urban neighborhoods at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, in collaboration with contemporary Ch’ol Maya community members. Through the PAMCI, Jean-Paul has directed two community-collaborative archaeological field seasons across both Great Corn Island and Little Corn Island and has collaborated with 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.