El Caimito), Atajadizo, and Guayabal cultures comprised a single, unilinear development when in fact the first of the three was separated from the other two by the frontier between the Casimiroid and the Ostionoid peoples noted above (Fig. 2). When unable to find ethnohistorical evidence that can be projected directly backward along the Tainos’ ancestral line, Caribbeanists have made use of knowledge about the chiefdoms on the mainland of South America that share a common ancestry with the Tainos (e.g., Siegel 1992; Spencer and Redmond 1992). As a last resort, they have also formulated and tested models obtained through the study of chiefdoms elsewhere in the world, notably polynesia, but the conclusions reached through indirect and general analogy are less reliable than those based on direct analogy because chiefdoms have developed under different conditions elsewhere in the world.

To put this point another way, sociocultural researchers in the Caribbean area have wisely chosen to take into consideration the culture-historical setting in which the behavior they are studying took place. They have also taken into consideration the natural-historical setting. For example, Haviser (1978) investigated the utilization of terrestrial resources on the island of Curaçao by plotting their distributions in the vicinity of the local settlements, and Watters (1982) and Keegan (1989) examined the balance between the use of terrestrial and maritime resources. In addition, Watters (1980) and his colleagues are examining how societies with similar cultural ancestries adapted to differences in their natural environments.

In studying the behavior that took place within the various natural- and cultural-historical settings, the sociocultural researchers have progressed beyond the norms formed by classification on the previous levels of interpretation, that is, beyond the types, modes, and cultures produced by grouping artifacts, their features, and their assemblages into classes and defining the classes in terms of their shared attributes. They focus instead on variations from the norms and, by so doing, have been able to fill significant gaps in our knowledge of conditions during prehistoric times.

Their research on variations in behavior provides those of us who continue to work on previous levels of interpretation with the information we need to avoid overclassifying our finds by assigning the products of variant behavior to classes. For example, research on the distributions of cultural traits within local areas has shown that the diagnostic or normative traits tend to be concentrated in the core parts of the areas and that the traits on boundaries tend to vary because of peripheral lag and influence from neighboring cultures. Discovery of this phenomenon has alerted Caribbeanists to the danger of classifying frontier dwellers as separate peoples and cultures. They have also avoided the trap of using single-activity sites as the basis for forming separate cultures.

Research on variation in behavior has further led to an awareness of cultural pluralities, such as the presence of intrusive wares in local pottery. For example, each of the local styles or complexes within the Cedrosan Saladoid subseries contains two wares, one characterized by white-on-red painted designs (wor) and the other by zoned, incised crosshatching (zic). Studies of the distribution of the two have indicated that the Cedrosan Saladoid potters added zic ware to their previous wor ware while living on the coast of South America and then took the two to the Antilles as plural ceramic complexes. Chanlatte Baik (1981) instead regards them as independent complexes introduced into the West Indies by a different series of local peoples—despite the fact that they occur in the same assemblages everywhere except at the northern end of the Saladoid expansion where a divergence into separate peoples and cultures appears to have taken place, reversing the convergence at the beginning of the migration (Rouse 1992, 85–90).

The activity that currently attracts the most attention among Caribbean archaeologists is subsistence. Specialists in zooarchaeology and paleobotany do most of the research on this subject. They originally studied the ecofacts obtained during artifactual research (Wing 1962) but soon began to do their own fieldwork using improved techniques for the recovery of remains.