Heye’s museum in 1991 and is converting it into a National Museum of the American Indian, with the mission of preserving and displaying the cultural heritage of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World, a mission for which the museum will be eminently suited because of the high quality of its artifacts.

In 1915, the New York Academy of Sciences undertook excavations in Puerto Rico as part of its scientific survey of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. J. Alden Mason (1941), a participant in this program, made the first systematic excavation of West Indian ball and dance courts at the site of Caguana (Capá). His finds went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which catalogued separately the assemblages obtained from the site’s various structures. This was a major improvement over the previous procedure of treating artifacts individually, and it made possible subsequent advances to higher levels of interpretation.

Ceremonial structures like those at Caguana were easily identified because their courts were lined with embankments and upright stone slabs, sometimes decorated with petroglyphs (Fig. 1). These ball courts have been intensively investigated in recent years (see Alegría 1983 for a summary), but the same cannot be said for houses. They were built of perishable materials and situated away from the refuse where the archaeologists of the time were digging in search of artifacts. Only during the 1990s have traces of multiple house posts been found in refuse-free soil (see, e.g., Versteeg and Schinkel 1992). Burials, too, have received relatively little attention because most of them contain few grave goods. Excavation in refuse heaps has recently improved by taking into consideration the processes of deposition, disturbance, and decay (Siegel 1992).

Over the years, important prehistoric sites have been preserved by converting them into public reserves. Parks on the Palo Seco midden in Trinidad (Bullbrook 1953) and at the Caguana ball and dance courts in Puerto Rico are good examples. Alegría (1983) has faithfully restored the courts at the latter site, has constructed a museum alongside them, and made Caguana a mecca for local schoolchildren and tourists.

With the shift of interest from individual artifacts to assemblages came a realization that the latter contain not only artifacts but also human skeletal material, food remains, charcoal, and other traces of human activity. These kinds of remains also began to be recovered in order to fill out the archaeological record, although they were little studied at the time.

Caribbeanists processed the artifacts by grouping them into classes, each defined by a complex of shared attributes, which is known as its type. Because pottery and items made of flint are abundant, complex, and variable, they were subjected to additional treatment. Vessels, potsherds, and, more recently, worked flint were broken down according to their features and then grouped into classes, each defined by its shared attributes. The defining traits are sometimes called types, like the attributes diagnostic of classes of whole artifacts, but most Caribbeanists prefer to call them modes in an effort to avoid confusion between the two categories. Types are the units of choice in studying artifacts from the standpoint of their use, and modes are preferred in approaching them from the viewpoint of their manufacture (Pantel 1988; Rouse 1972, 45–55).

Interest in artifacts has declined as the supply of quality specimens has dwindled and professional archaeologists have added chronological, culture-historical, and sociocultural research to their repertoire. Only avocational archaeologists continue to be preoccupied with the artifactual level. As elsewhere, it has been difficult to persuade them to catalog their finds so as to make them usable on the more abstract levels of interpretation.

The rise of conservation archaeology in the final decades of the twentieth century has led to an increase of professional activity on the artifactual level. Assemblages of remains that are in danger of being destroyed by the construction of roads, buildings, and other kinds of structures are now being removed to museums and other repositories for safekeeping. Work of this kind has been most intensively done in Puerto Rico and the American Virgin Islands, where the antiquity laws of the United States apply and federal conservation funds are available, but it is also common in many other parts of the Caribbean area, notably in the French West Indies and Venezuela (Wagner 1978).