Test excavations have been carried out at the island’s eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Fort Oranje (Haviser and Sealy 1999) and three underwater surveys were undertaken between 19 at the historical anchorage of Kralendijk (Nagelkerken and Hayes 2002). Historical archaeological research on Bonaire has been limited. This area, located at the periphery of an island that was itself at the periphery of the Dutch colonial empire, is a unique place at which to study the everyday life and struggles of an enslaved population that had limited access to the outside world. Salinas, known as saliñas in Papiamentu, are found in various parts of the island’s coastline, but most notably in the southern end. Throughout this time, Bonaire’s economy largely relied on solar salt production. The Dutch forcibly took possession in 1636, and with the exception of a short period of time in the early nineteenth century when it was in British hands, the island has been a Dutch colony ever since. Bonaire was a colonial backwater since the Spanish colonized the island in the early sixteenth century. Of particular interest are the saltpans on Bonaire or Boneiru in Bonairean Papiamentu, a 288 km² arid island located in the southern Caribbean, approximately 80 km north of the Venezuelan coast and 50 km east of Curaçao. Maarten all contain natural salinas that have been modified by humans into solar salt ponds and saltpans and harvested to varying degrees in the past. The Dutch islands of Bonaire, Klein Bonaire, Curaçao, Aruba, and St. While the history and archaeology of salt has received much less attention than the study of sugar - the main Caribbean export product throughout the colonial period - various sea salt production sites in the region have been studied in recent years (Morsink 2012 Kepecs 2015 McKillop 2018 Antczak 2019). Then, during the Age of European expansion, the precious white commodity became hotly contested as fisheries in Europe increased, long sea voyages became more common, and competition between expanding colonial empires intensified. It has been demonstrated that in the northwestern Caribbean the Indigenous people were already vying for solar sea salt long before the first Europeans set foot on the islands (Morsink 2012). In the Caribbean region, the presence of numerous natural salt-producing lagoons or salinas on different islands has had profound impacts on pre-colonial Indigenous peoples and early modern economies. Salt, a vital food preservative and formidable flavor enhancer, has been an extremely important commodity since prehistoric times.
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