Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean

CARIBBEAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOHISTORY

L. Antonio Curet, Series Editor

Islands at the Crossroads

Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean

Edited by

L. ANTONIO CURET AND MARK W. HAUSER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2011

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

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The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Islands at the crossroads : migration, seafaring, and interaction in the Caribbean / edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser.

        p. cm. — (Caribbean archaeology and ethnohistory)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8173-5655-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8537-8 (electronic) 1. Ethnology—Caribbean Area. 2. Ethnohistory—Caribbean Area. 3. Seafaring life—Caribbean Area. 4. Acculturation—Caribbean Area. 5. Caribbean Area—Social life and customs. 6. Caribbean Area—Emigration and immigration. I. Curet, L. Antonio, 1960–II. Hauser, Mark W.

   GN564.C37I75 2011

   305.8009729—dc22

                                                                                                                   2011010447

Cover illustration: Jill Seagard, Illustrator, Department of Anthropology, The Field Museum. Cover design by Erin Dangar.

In memory of Irving B. Rouse, who set the foundations for the study of interaction in Caribbean archaeology

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Migration, Seafaring, and Cultural Contact in the Caribbean

L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser

I. PEOPLES AND BOUNDARIES: SYSTEMATICS AND THE PRACTICE OF CARIBBEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

1. Irving Rouse's Contribution to American Archaeology: The Case of Migration

L. Antonio Curet

2. The Ghost of Caliban: Island Archaeology, Insular Archaeologists, and the Caribbean

Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo

3. Colonies without Frontiers: Inter-island Trade in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Caribbean

Mark W. Hauser and Kenneth G. Kelly

II. TRACING EXCHANGE: INTENSITIES AND SCALES OF INTERACTION

4. Patterns of Contact between the Islands of the Caribbean and the Surrounding Mainland as a Navigation Problem

Richard T. Callaghan

5. Ties with the Homelands: Archipelagic Interaction and the Enduring Role of the South and Central American Mainlands in the Pre-Columbian Lesser Antilles

Corinne L. Hofman, Arie Boomert, Alistair J. Bright, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Sebastiaan Knippenberg, and Alice V. M. Samson

6. Contraband in the Convento? Material Indications of Trade Relations in the Spanish Colonies

Ingrid Marion Newquist

7. Good as Gold: The Aesthetic Brilliance of the Lucayans

Mary Jane Berman

III. REDEFINING BOUNDARIES THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION

8. The Magens House, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies: Archaeology of an Urban House Compound and Its Relationship to Local Interactions and Global Trade

Douglas V. Armstrong and Christian Williamson

9. Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind

Reniel Rodríguez Ramos

10. Competitive Polities and Territorial Expansion in the Caribbean

Peter E. Siegel

11. Islands at the Crossroads: Archaeology of Interaction in the Caribbean

Mark W. Hauser and L. Antonio Curet

References

List of Contributors

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1. Map of the Caribbean Basin

2.1. Visibility ranges in the Caribbean region

2.2. School Begins, an 1899 Puck Cartoon illustrating the four new colonies taken in 1898

3.1. Guadeloupe, French Antilles, Earthenware Sellers; and Un Rue de la Martinique

3.2. Photomicrographs of Valluris under plain and polarized light

4.1. Drift Voyages: (a) Northern Cuba, January; (b) Cabo San Antonio, October

4.2. Drift Voyages: (a) Southern Jamaica, July; (b) Cabo Beata, January

4.3. Drift Voyages: (a) Southern Puerto Rico, January; (b) Western Antigua, January

5.1. Map of the Circum-Caribbean

5.2. Typo-chronology of the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico

5.3. Mainland influences on Saladoid artifacts of the Ceramic Age in the Lesser Antilles

5.4. Barrancoid influences on ceramics from Trinidad, Tobago, and Martinique

6.1. Map of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, published in 1873 by Samuel Hazard

6.2. Site map of the excavation trench at the Convento de san Francisco

7.1. Map of the Bahama Archipelago

8.1. Ruins of main house at Magens House and servant quarters and cookhouse

8.2. Map of Kongens Quarter, including Magens house compound

8.3. A Goad insurance map from 1897 showing structures on the Magens property

8.4. Stereoptical photographs of the Magens house and the town of Charlotte Amalie, Danish West Indies

8.5. Bone button blanks

9.1. Edge-ground cobbles and milling stone from Puerto Ferro and Maruca, Puerto Rico

9.2. Comparison of personal adornments from the Antilles and the Isthmo-Colombian area

9.3. Comparison of prestige emblems from the Antilles and the Isthmo-Colombian area

9.4. Julian steward's model for the spread of Circum-Caribbean cultures

10.1. Rank-size distribution of all documented Period IV ball courts/plazas on Puerto Rico

10.2. Rank-size distribution of the documented Period IV ball courts/plazas in the Caguana polity

10.3. Rank-size distribution of the documented Period IV ball courts/plazas in the Palo Hincado polity

Tables

3.1. Breakdown of ceramic assemblage at seven eighteenth-century sites in colonial Jamaica

4.1. Percentage of voyages reaching the mainland and maximum duration

7.1. Sites and their island locations, as mentioned in the text

7.2. Lucayan exchange items and gifts to Christopher Columbus and his crew

7.3. Christopher Columbus observes gold in the Bahamas

7.4. Non-local ceramic frequency by island

10.1. Chronological assessments for the civic-ceremonial centers discussed in the text

10.2. Results of the Rank-size simulation runs for the Period iv civic-ceremonial centers

10.3. Linear distances between polity centers and satellite civic-ceremonial centers

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tom Rocek, organizer of the Seventy-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2006, for inviting L. Antonio Curet to organize the opening session of the meetings that led to the formation of this volume. We would also like to thank John Terrell for acting as discussant for the panel and providing commentary that helped highlight the potential for archaeology in understanding the Caribbean past. The present publication includes most of the papers presented at this symposium, combined with additional ones added later.

We would also like to express our gratitude to all the contributors for their patience and endurance during the long journey of writing, editing, correcting, and more editing. We gratefully thank Kathleen Deagan and Samuel Wilson for providing both the editors and the contributors with excellent comments that did nothing but strengthen the publication.

Finally, we are indebted to the staff of The University of Alabama Press and, especially, its acquisition editor, Judith Knight, who retired in January 2010. Her unconditional support, encouragement, and continuous nagging was always a source of motivation. However, more than anything we really appreciate how she always believed in what we do! You will be missed!

Introduction

Migration, Seafaring, and Cultural Contact in the Caribbean

L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser

By the mere definition of human society and culture, interaction is the basis of most, if not all, human behavior. Just a quick overview of the different social sciences reflects the preeminent position of interaction. Sociology focuses on intra-group relations, political science on power relations, psychology on individual or personal relations, and anthropology on inter- and intra-cultural relations. Despite its intrinsic role in societies, interaction is one of the most complicated concepts and phenomena in human groups. One of many reasons for this is that human relations can be multidimensional; in other words, one particular individual or group of individuals can have multiple types of interactions (e.g., friendship, kinship, patron-client, and elite relations), operating at multiple scales (e.g., individual, intra- and inter-household, inter- and intra-communal, regional and extra-regional relations). To complicate things even more, the various types of interactions are multivectorial since they are strongly dependent on the social, historical, political, and cultural conditions.

The combination of all these and other factors results in the creation of great variability of potential types of social relations, at different scales and different degrees of magnitude, that are very fluid, can be manipulated by multiple actors, and can change rapidly. It is for these reasons that it is important for our analysis of past behavior to understand that all these forms of interactions affect each other, acting together in determining the final social and cultural output. It is also true, however, that while different forms of interactions may influence these processes to a higher or lower degree, their importance throughout history is very fluid and they may change even within one generation. Plasticity, variability, and unpredictability are what make this interaction a fascinating yet elusive phenomenon for social scientists and an extremely challenging one for archaeologists, in particular.

This volume is all about interaction in the Caribbean. Geographically, our main focus is the interaction not at low levels or small scales, but at higher and larger ones. Particularly, we are interested in addressing the interaction between people from different islands or between the islands and the continental masses (i.e., non-local interaction). Contrary to traditional Caribbean archaeology, we do not focus on interaction between cultures, but, instead, focus on interaction between people or groups of people. That being said, however, we do not ignore the importance of other forms of interactions, such as those between individuals and the cultural and natural landscapes and the supernatural world. Because interactions of different natures or at different scales are intimately related, many of the chapters also include some aspects of these other forms of relations.

Interaction, as a focus of inquiry, and the explanation of cultural continuity and social transformation has been one of the primary foci of archaeological inquiry in the Americas (e.g., Duff 2002; Hayden and Schulting 1997; Hegmon 2000). The Caribbean is no exception (see Armstrong 2003; Crock and Petersen 2004; Deagan 1988, 1995; Delpuech and Hofman 2004; Hauser 2008; Hofman and Hoogland 2004; Keegan 1992; Oliver 2009; Rouse 1986, 1992; Wilson 2007). This has been, in part, due to an implicit or assumed framing in which a local phenomenon can be explained through regional trends and cultural contours. But what is exactly meant by interaction, and how exactly has it been operationalized?

Indeed, for Irving Rouse (1986, 1992), whose initial framings of regional analysis in Caribbean archaeology are still with us in many ways, interaction was a default, if unexplored, condition of cultural migration and displacement or acculturation (1992). Daniel Odess has defined interaction as the exchange of materials, ideas, beliefs, and information between members of different corporate groups (Odess 1998:417). As such it seems a fairly innocuous set of human behaviors to gauge through the material record in which discrete localities, separated by shorelines and boundary waters, seem to share stylistic movements in pottery and the valuing of exotic materials, and, probably to a certain degree—worldviews. Indeed, such a perspective assumes to a certain extant a corporate identity through which interaction is mediated.

However, if we are to accept, as Samuel M. Wilson (2001) and others have postulated, that the Caribbean before Europeans was a culturally diverse and ethnically heterogeneous region, then we must not take these corporate identities for granted. Instead, we should look to the ways in which the material remnants are not seen as signs of solidarities established between polities—rather they are seen as the material evidence for the attempt to create these solidarities (see McGuire 1982; see Barth 1969 for a discussion of boundaries and identity). This becomes an even more important consideration in the Colonial period, where migration, forced and voluntary, increased in magnitude and scale. During such a period, which becomes the corporate group of interaction—Jamaica vs. Cuba, Spanish vs. English, Afro-Jamaican vs. Anglo-Jamaican? Indeed, it is during this period, from which it has been argued that the modern world emerged (Scott 2003), that power became an important variable in understanding the variegated nature of interaction. Out of such a framework it is important to understand historically particular terms such as creolization, transculturation, and transformation, and even accommodation and resistance might be as applicable in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean as the Colonial Caribbean. Save one very important exception. Without the assistance of text in order to create contextual synthesis, it is difficult to impossible to ask these questions in prehistory.

Ultimately, the utility of interaction as a framework for analysis is its ability to disentangle the social relations of a particular group of humans at varying scales of analysis. In this book we are, for the most part, focusing on non-local interaction. By non-local we are explicitly referring to interaction that moves beyond units of analysis that archaeologists have traditionally imposed upon archaeological communities that were assumed to correspond to social boundaries of human interaction. This is not to dismiss or overlook the analytical importance of localized and intimate interactions in understanding regional perspectives. As Kathleen Deagan (1988, 2001, 2002) has noted in her work in the colonial Spanish Caribbean, a focus on intimate interactions and their material manifestations brings attention to larger processes of imperial dynamics. In the case of Pre-Columbian archaeology, this has translated into interaction between settlements on different islands and beyond the regional polities, as evidenced by site-specific archaeologies. In historical archaeology, where a traditional unit of observation in slave societies has been the sugar estate or colonial settlements in understanding imperial regimes, it is an examination beyond the specific village in which most enslaved labor lived.

Studies of Interaction in the Caribbean

The Caribbean Basin is defined as the area between Central America and the strand of islands that extend from the Yucatán and Florida peninsulas to the Orinoco River in northeastern South America (Figure 1.1). The climate is tropical and subtropical, and it includes both sedimentary and volcanic islands as much as atolls. Geographically, the Caribbean Basin covers an area of approximately 233,869 km² and includes a wide range of geographic regions from islands, sand bars, isthmuses, and continental masses to tropical, subtropical, and sub-temperate climates. As one can expect, this large region with such a variety of natural settings saw the development of a variety of ancient cultural, social, linguistic, and economic traditions.

Like in most regions around the globe, the initial archaeologies of the Caribbean Basin dealt with this variability by focusing on culture history. Particularly, the efforts were directed to developing a chronology for different areas within the region and delineating cultural boundaries in order to define more or less homogeneous cultural areas. It is from these early attempts that we have the division between the Greater and the Lesser Antilles in the archipelago (Rouse 1964, 1982, 1992) and the definition of other larger areas such as the intermediate area (Haberland 1957; Willey 1971), the Circum-Caribbean (steward 1948b), lower Central America (Linares 1979), and, more recently, the isthmus-Colombian area (Hoopes 2005; Hoopes and Fonseca 2003).

The idea of interaction within the Caribbean archipelago and between the islands and the continent is an old one in Caribbean archaeology. Many forms of interactions have been suggested throughout the history of the discipline to explain a wide range of phenomena present in the archaeological record. Here we present some of the types of long-distance interaction suggested for the Caribbean and briefly, but critically, discuss some of the limitations of many of the arguments used to support them. More detailed discussion positions are included in the concluding chapter of this volume (see Hauser and Curet, this volume), where these and other issues are approached from a conceptual, epistemological, and paradigmatic perspective.

The form of interaction that has received the greatest amount of attention in the Caribbean is migration. Migration is an alluring topic for students of island cultures, and the Caribbean archipelago has proved to be a particularly rich ground for developing theories about population movements (e.g., see Berman and Gnivecki 1993, 1995; Curet 2005; Keegan 1995a, 2004; Rouse 1986). At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, archaeologists and historians have been working on identifying the origins and the routes of migration of the early inhabitants of the Caribbean (Chanlatte Baik and Narganes Stordes 1983, 1985, 1986; de Hostos 1923, 1924; Lovén 1935; Rainey 1940; Rouse 1952, 1986). Furthermore, migration has become the explanation par excellence for a number of phenomena, including social and cultural change (Arvelo and Wagner 1984; Veloz Maggiolo 1991, 1993; Zucchi 1984; Zucchi and Tarble 1984). The standard template of migration has been a monochromatic one, at least in terms of the population of origin and the migratory routes. With few exceptions, northeastern South America is traditionally used as the potential region of origin of most of the accepted migration models, and the chain of islands as the main migratory route. The only widely accepted exception to this is a potential migration of early archaic groups from the Yucatán Peninsula to Cuba and Hispaniola (Wilson et al. 1998; see also Rodríguez Ramos in this volume).

Evidence accumulating since the 1970s suggests that migrations could have also occurred from other regions of origins and through different routes, especially by navigating through the Caribbean sea instead of island hopping. For example, in 1984 Alberta Zucchi and Kate Tarble argued that the affinities between the Cedeñoide from northwestern Venezuela and the ones from El Caimito from Dominican Republic suggest a possible direct migration between these two regions. Also, various scholars such as Marcio Veloz Maggiolo (1991:64) and Richard T. Callaghan (1993, 1995) have questioned the Yucatán origin of Archaic groups and have suggested that the lithic material is more similar to one found in Lower Central America for the same period. Others have suggested Florida or the Southeast of the United States as places of origins of the Archaics of the Greater Antilles (Febles 1991; Veloz Maggiolo 1991, 1993).

Other forms of interactions besides migration between the continent and the islands followed more or less the same unfounded assumptions: they were more frequent and stronger with northeastern South America and the migration had to be through the chain of islands. Throughout the years, however, there have been hints of indications from multiple lines of evidence (e.g., ethnohistory and archaeology) that this may not always be true. These include similarities in artifacts from the Greater Antilles, on one hand, and Colombia and Lower Central America, on the other. These similarities have been observed in early ceramics (Meggers and Evans 1983; Zucchi and Tarble 1984), Archaic lithic technology, tool types, and foodstuff (Rodríguez Ramos 2002a, also in this volume; Rodríguez Ramos and Pagán Jiménez 2006), late prehistoric use of black wood objects (Helms 1987), and lapidary (Rodríguez Ramos 2002a, 2007, this volume; Rodríguez Ramos and Pagán Jiménez 2006). Some of these suggestions have been supported by simulated navigational studies conducted by Callaghan (1993, 1995, 1999) that have shown that direct canoe seafaring routes from Colombia and the Greater Antilles are possible and with high rates of success.

Similarly, but in a way easier to detect, connections have been observed between the Greater and Lesser Antilles. Stylistic similarities between pottery from the Greater Antilles and some assemblages from the Lesser Antilles during the Early and Late Ceramic Age have led many people to argue for strong, frequent, and long-lasting interaction throughout the archipelago (Crock 2000; Hofman 1995; Hofman and Hoogland 2004; Hoogland and Hofman 1999; Lundberg 2003). Also, the distribution of some raw material clearly supports the idea of at least trade and exchange within the region (Knippenberg 2006).

Interisland relationships have always been assumed in Caribbean archaeology since its inception. Even during his first voyage to the Caribbean, Christopher Columbus noticed that news and European objects were already traveling throughout the Bahamian archipelago faster than his three ships (Colón 1965). Since early in his academic career, Irving Rouse (1951) also noted that the boundaries between ceramic styles in the Greater Antilles occurred between islands rather than across islands. More precisely, similar ceramic traits seemed to have been distributed on both sides of passages between islands, suggesting connections across bodies of water, while dissimilarity in ceramics increased between opposite ends of the same island. Therefore, both ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence strongly suggested the presence of strong and continuous interaction between islands. However, most of this evidence concentrates on relationships between neighboring islands or groups of islands, and not beyond.

From this discussion and many of the chapters included in this volume, it is clear that extensive and intensive long-distance interaction occurred throughout the ancient history of the Caribbean. Despite advances in identifying the interaction between different regions, the study of long-distance relationship in the Caribbean has been limited in terms of its theoretical and explanatory discussion. Probably the main problem present in many of the studies of interaction in the region is the lack of a clear definition of the type of interaction and the social, political, economic, and cultural mechanisms that were active in such processes. This is true for most of the types of interactions already mentioned. For example, the use of the concept of migration tends to be very superficial and normally involves simply the movement of people. At best, some speculative discussion about the reasons of migration is included in the discourse. Most of the time arguments shine for the lack of details on the type of migration, who migrated, the steps involved in the process of migration, and the relationships between the parent, migrant, and local communities (Curet 2005).

A similar problem exists with the term interaction, which, in many cases, is not clearly defined. With few exceptions, the type of interaction and the dynamics involved in the process are not taken into consideration or suggested at all. In many of the cases where a type of interaction is proposed, alternative explanations are not considered and discarded before favoring one over the rest. A classic example of this problem is the Cedrosan Saladoid subseries. This subseries is defined by very diagnostic types of pottery (e.g., white-on-red pottery), it extends from at least the Orinoco River mouth to Puerto Rico, and lasted at least one thousand years in some areas. Many Caribbeanists have taken the extension of the subseries and the strong conservatism of the ceramics through time as evidence of intense and continuous interaction throughout the region (see Delpuech and Hofman 2004; Roe 1989). However, most of the discussions stop there, falling short of a more detailed explanation of the actual mechanisms involved, the type of interaction (e.g., wife exchange, alliances, confederacies, ritual and economic exchange, frequent interisland celebrations or feasts), and the possible meanings of the variability through time and space (see Boomert 2001 for an exception).

Description of the Volume

This volume is the result of the opening session of the Seventy-first Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held at San Juan and organized by L. Antonio Curet. Curet made a conscious effort to be inclusive and cover as much of the diversity present in Caribbean archaeology as possible. This approach was also used in the preparation of the present volume. First, we were interested on including articles on most of the geographic extension of the Caribbean Basin, including the Bahamas, the Greater and Lesser Antilles, northeastern and northern South America, and Central America. Second, we wanted to include studies on both interisland and island-continent interaction. Third, instead of preparing a collection of chapters with a common monolithic paradigm, we made an effort to include researchers with different intellectual backgrounds and theoretical positions.

Finally, we have attempted to bring together both historic and prehistoric archaeologies that have interrogated interaction to some degree. Our reason for doing this is twofold. First, conceptually, we felt that while it is an important bracket in historical narrative, the use of 1492 as an epochal shift in the lives of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean has the potential to place an arbitrary limit on the nature of questions asked by scholars in the different fields. Granted, the emergence of European colonization saw the devastation of indigenous populations, but to say that indigenous populations, Europeans, and Africans did not interact during the subsequent 400 years might be a bit of an overstatement. It also assumes that movement of people, interaction, and colonization of peoples did not have similar effects of demographic change. The second reason for including both groups is to introduce a conversation within the region. It has been a long-held convention that historical archaeology and prehistoric archaeology had little interaction with each other, with a few notable examples (e.g., Hofman and Bright 2004; Petersen et al. 1999; Petersen and Watters 1988; Watters 1987). For example, at the biannual meetings of International Association for Caribbean Archaeology (IACA) it is often the case that the chapters are divided along these chronological markers. The danger involved is a divergence of theoretical interests, methodological fracturing, and incongruous conceptual framing. Questions and dynamics of population movements and interaction dealt with in historical archaeology (creolization, transformation, ethnogenesis, multiscalar trade) are not less salient before 1492. Indeed, it is incumbent on historic archaeologists to find ways to draw out useful arguments that archaeologists can use without the aid of texts. While the convention in Caribbean archaeology has long been to separate prehistoric and historic archaeology, keeping in mind some notable examples of contact and protohistoric archaeological projects (Deagan 1988, 1995, 2001; Deagan and Cruxent 2002a, 2002b), we have decided that we will employ both in the volume.

We lengthily debated how to organize the chapters in this volume. After rejecting more traditional criteria, such as prehistoric vs. historic archaeology and island-island vs. island-continent, we opted to sort the chapters into three major topics. The first one, Peoples and Boundaries: Systematics and the Practice of Caribbean Archaeology, includes chapters dealing with conceptual or theoretical issues. The chapter by Curet discusses the epistemological and methodological problems with Rouse's approach to the study of migrations in archaeology. Despite these weaknesses, however, Curet argues that Rouse's real contribution was in keeping migrations alive in the debates on social change in American archaeology. In the second chapter, Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo critically reviews the issue of island society and island archaeology, particularly, the idea of the ocean being a barrier. As do many other authors, she argues that we should use the concept of seascape, where the ocean is part of the cultural landscape and has to be interpreted within the cultural and social context of the particular communities we are studying. Finally, Mark W. Hauser and Kenneth G. Kelly question the utility of colonial boundaries in establishing the scales through which interaction, primarily trade, is understood in the daily provisioning of trade goods.

Chapters dealing with identifying evidence of different types of non-local interaction, the possible routes, or their impact are included in the second section, Tracing Exchange: Intensities and Scales of Interaction. Chapters by Mary Jane Berman and by Corinne L. Hofman, Arie Boomert, Alistair J. Bright, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Sebastiaan Knippenberg, and Alice V. M. Samson look at the presence of non-local objects in different parts of the archipelago and trace them to possible places of origin. However, most of them go beyond and try to incorporate some meaning to this evidence. The chapter by Richard T. Callaghan discusses simulation studies on seafaring by native people in the Caribbean. But, contrary to most of his previous writings, where he studied the possibility of success of drifting from the continental coasts to the island, in this chapter he considers the reverse route, from the Greater Antilles to the continents. The chapter by Ingrid Marion Newquist is an example of the presence of non-local interaction in a colonial setting, particularly, the evidence for contraband in a convent in Dominican Republic. Besides finding some evidence of resistance to the Spanish trading laws, the importance of this study is that even the Catholic Church, one of the primary imperial and colonial institutions of the Spanish crown, was doing it.

The third and final section, Redefining Boundaries through Social Interaction, includes chapters dealing with breaking the barriers imposed by the traditional normative perspective that has dominated Caribbean archaeology. In their discussion of the Magens House in Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, Douglas v. Armstrong and Christian Williamson examine the assemblage of a merchant's property (household and workshop). This research highlights the importance of considering multiple scales of interaction (from the global to the intimate) by looking at the ways in which residents of this household navigated between the local production and the transatlantic trade. Reniel Rodríguez Ramos's chapter presents relatively good evidence of similarities between the Greater Antilles and the Isthmus-Colombian region that, contrary to the traditional view, strongly suggests the possibility of continuous, direct contact between these two regions from Archaic to protohistoric times. The chapter by Peter E. Siegel reminds us that even intra-island (i.e., within the same culture area) interactions are historical processes that can produce particular localities. Furthermore, he also points out that not all interaction was necessarily peaceful and voluntarily, but could have also involved warfare, where products, people, and information could have been moved forcibly from one place to another. Finally, Hauser and Curet give an overview of the volume within the context of the history of Caribbean archaeology and propose issues that need to be addressed in the future to further the advances in the study of non-local interaction in the past decade in the region.

While this volume is intended to provide an overview, both temporal and geographic, it is not meant to be exhaustive. Nor is this volume meant to be a synthesis. Rather it is meant to highlight potential trends and questions to be asked through varied methodologies, materials, and areas of interest. While research in the Caribbean has enjoyed a degree of maturity of late, it is still faced with problems of synthesis. Highly energetic natural forces such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes seriously impact the site formation process, making site detection and excavation difficult. In addition, the loosely linked cultural mosaic that comprises the contemporary archipelago leads to an uneven topography in language, national research agendas, and ability to support such research. That being said, as we compiled these chapters for publication, we were struck by how much has and can be accomplished in Caribbean archaeology.

I

Peoples and Boundaries: Systematics and the Practice of Caribbean Archaeology

1

Irving Rouse's Contribution to American Archaeology

The Case of Migration

L. Antonio Curet

When discussing the study of long-distance interaction in the Caribbean, one cannot ignore the contributions of Irving Rouse. While he was not the first scholar to suggest the close relationship between the islands, South America, and even Central America, he, in collaboration with local archaeologists, was able to suggest potential routes supported by empirical evidence. From these studies, Rouse developed models to define different types of interaction, mainly migrations and intercultural relationships. These models have been applied in one way or another by almost every archaeologist working in the region. Unfortunately, for the longest time most Caribbeanists accepted these models as given, and they were used in an indiscriminate and uncritical manner.

In recent years I have been re-evaluating many of the basic assumptions and epistemology of the models used by many archaeologists in the Caribbean. This has led me to question the work of Irving Rouse, particularly, its postulations and premises (Curet 2003, 2004a, 2005). Because of these publications, many of my colleagues have confused the critique of Rouse's work with personal attacks. There is no doubt that Irving Rouse was the single individual who probably has contributed the most to Caribbean archaeology. His contributions (e.g., Rouse 1939, 1952, 1964, 1986; Rouse and Faber Morse 1999) to the archaeology of the region covers a wide geographic area from Venezuela to Cuba, various methodological approaches, and the development of a general chronological sequence for the whole archipelago and northeastern South America. In my opinion, two of the most important contributions of Irving Rouse to archaeology are his concept of modes and his approach to ancient migrations. However, this does not mean that his work is free of flaws, especially when it is considered that many of his premises are based on unfounded assumptions that were well accepted in the 1930s, but now considered erroneous. As a matter of fact, my criticisms were not directed that much to Rouse, but to many of us who kept using his methods, models, and system without questioning it from the perspective of modern anthropological theory.

It is unfortunate, however, that many of my own and other people's criticisms have emphasized the weaknesses or negative aspects of Rouse's work, while tending to ignore his positive contributions to the discipline. The main argument of this chapter is that despite many of the problems in Rouse's work, he impacted the discipline in ways that are normally not easily recognized and quickly discarded. Simply put, this chapter presents a tribute to Irving Rouse's contribution to the topic of migration in archaeology, one of the landmarks of his legacy. However, in order to understand Rouse's influence on this topic in archaeology, it is important to put it in a historical perspective and recognize that Rouse was a man of his times; that is, the first half of the 1900s. For this reason I begin this chapter by presenting the topic of migration in a historical perspective. Then, I discuss the developments in Rouse's positions through time, presenting their strengths and weaknesses. I end by putting these two discussions together and explaining how they helped shape some aspects of migrations in contemporary archaeology.

Migration in the History of American Archaeology

In the early years of archaeology, at the end of the nineteenth century, archaeological theory was dominated by cultural evolution. This perspective emphasized cultures as adaptive entities that shifted according to changes in the local environment in order to survive. Migration had little to contribute to this theoretical framework since it had little or no impact on the adaptation of cultures. If anything, migration was seen as evidence of failure of cultures to adapt to a particular setting or conditions.

Later on, with the antievolutionist movement in American anthropology, Historical Particularism became the dominant paradigm in archaeology. The importance that this perspective gave to the collection and organization of data led to an emphasis on the definition of cultural areas and history based on the commonality of cultural traits within areas and periods. From this approach, any similarity between cultural areas and periods is explained by claiming diffusion of ideas or people. In other words, migration was used (abused and misused, according to Raymond Thompson, see below) as a potential explanation for the diffusion of cultural traits across the boundaries of cultural areas. However, as is discussed below, migrations were identified in the archaeological record very casually and without the appropriate evidence. Further, the recognition and definition of migration is not necessarily an explanation for changes in the archaeological record, but a descriptive statement.

In the 1950s the identification of migration in archaeology received a more rigorous treatment. It was during this time that migration was seen by American archaeologists as a critical factor that could produce a variety of responses from human groups, leading to cultural change. However, it was also admitted that a more formalized epistemology of migration studies was needed in order to create more scientifically robust conclusions. Two seminal publications came out during this time. The first one was the result of a seminar and was published by Gordon Willey and his colleagues, including Rouse (1956). The emphasis of both the seminar and the book was to model the changes produced by migration and cultural contact by taking into consideration different empirical cases from throughout the world. They also stressed the need for distinguishing between archaeological inference and evidence and that all inferences have to include the evidence on which they are based. Rouse contributed, particularly, with the case of the interaction between the Saladoid and the Archaic as an example of how a more advanced migrant group can interact with local less-developed natives and influence each other, but the former influencing the latter more significantly.

The second important publication of this time was an edited volume by Thompson (1958) that attempted to develop more rigorous standards to detect and define migrations in the