Caribbean

In 1963, French West Indian archaeologists initiated a series of biennial meetings called the International Congress for the Study of Pre-Columbian Cultures of the Lesser Antilles (Map 1). Over the next decades, so many specialists in the prehistory of the rest of the West Indies, Venezuela, and the Guianas began to attend these meetings that the name was changed to the Congress for Caribbean Archaeology.

The term Caribbean is not used in this context to the refer to the entire Caribbean basin but to a culture area that existed in the eastern half of the basin during pre-Columbian times (Willey 1971, 360–393). The western half of the basin formed a separate intermediate area, called that because it lay between the centers of civilization in mexico and peru (Map 2). Few intermediate-area specialists come to the Caribbean congresses; they have little incentive to participate because the problems they study differ from those in the eastern half of the basin.

During prehistoric times, the two areas constituted separate interaction spheres (Caldwell 1966, 338), kept apart because the people living there were unable to travel back and forth across the Caribbean Sea. The inhabitants of the two spheres developed differently because they were unable to exchange artifacts, customs, and beliefs. Christopher Columbus’s introduction of European ships, capable of traveling on the high seas, remedied this difficulty and made possible a single circum-Caribbean sphere, with its own set of problems.

This article focuses on the Caribbean sphere and its problems, but it is not entirely limited to pre-Columbian times. It also covers the disappearance of the native peoples as they came into contact with European, African, and Asian immigrants. It thus includes the indigenous side of the so-called Columbian exchange of cultural, linguistic, and biological traits that took place in the circum-Caribbean sphere (Crosby 1972).

Research within these limits has progressed through a sequence of four stages, during which the participants expanded to increasingly high levels of abstraction, each made possible by the results achieved on the previous levels. The initial stage may be called that of artifactual research because it was marked by the discovery, collection, and interpretation of structures and manufactures. In the second stage, chronological research, Caribbeanists began to organize their finds into systems of areas, periods, and ages. In the ensuing stage of culture-historical research, they used those systems to differentiate human populations or peoples, each with its own distinctive culture, and to investigate the peoples’ ancestries, that is, their cultural heritages. In the final stage of sociocultural research, they focused on the societies into which the population groups organized themselves and studied the ways in which these social groups used and modified both their cultural and their natural heritages (Rouse 1986, Fig. 30).

Artifactual Research

Archaeology began in the Caribbean area, as elsewhere, with the discovery, description, and identification of buildings, tools, and other artifacts—and with their removal to private homes and public museums. At first, these items of material culture were collected individually; later, they were excavated in the form of assemblages from the sites where they had been deposited.

So far as is known, the first European settlers did not undertake archaeological research. It was not until 1740 that an explorer named Nicolas Hortsmann reported the discovery of petroglyphs (rock carvings) in the present country of Guyana (Osgood 1946, 21). In 1749, Father Juan de Talamanco, a Spanish historian and archaeologist, made a pioneer study of four carved stone figures of Taino Indian deities (zemis) that had been sent to him from the northern part of the Dominican Republic, and in 1775, Pedro del Prado, a Cuban, wrote about a stool (dujo) of the Tainos that had been found in the eastern part of his country (Ortiz 1935, 71–72).

The first known exhibition of artifacts took place in Puerto Rico in 1854. It featured the collection of Jorge Latimer, a local merchant, that was eventually acquired by the Museum of Natural History of the smithsonian institution, Washington, D.C. (Coll y Toste 1907, 30– 31). In 1867, the government of British Guiana (now Guyana) established a museum to house items obtained from the local Indians and their sites. This museum, which bears the name of Walter Roth, a longtime director, includes natural as well as cultural objects. Its holdings in the former field are dominant, as is the collection in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History (Osgood 1946, 40–41).