In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Caribbean island of Tobago was contested by several European powers. Among them was an unlikely colonizer, the small Duchy of Courland, located in the western part of modern-day Latvia, which established the New Courland colony on the west coast of Tobago, in May 1654. The aim of this study was to determine the exact geographic location of this settlement through examination of historical texts, maps, and geographic information systems (GIS) data. Remote sensing and GIS methods were used to map the Courlander Fort Jacob on the site of an earlier Dutch fortification, Nieuw Vlissingen. Subsequently, a predictive model was created in ArcGIS to analyze the probability of a 17th-century animal-powered sugar mill location on the territory of an 18th-century British sugar estate. Several locales were identified as matching the model criteria. The results of this study contribute to the knowledge about the New Courland colony and can be used in the design of a future archaeological fieldwork project.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:honorstheses-1298 |
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Creators | Sumner, Amanda |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Honors Undergraduate Theses |
Page generated in 0.0024 seconds