between the Haiti and the Dominican Republic is an exception.)

The reason for this discrepancy is to be found in a statement of the Spanish settlers that the Tainos on the eastern end of Hispaniola and the western end of Puerto Rico visited each other on a regular basis just to pass the time of day. The inhabitants of the adjacent ends of neighboring islands thus appear to have interacted more closely with each other than they did with the peoples on the opposite ends of their own islands, presumably because they had learned to travel more easily by water while living along the great river systems in South America and had carried this skill to the West Indies. On the contrary, the lithic-, archaic-, and historic-age peoples all came from areas where land travel was dominant (Rouse 1982, 48).

This discussion of sociocultural research illustrates the value of working on all four levels of interpretation. Caribbeanists would have accomplished little if they had jumped directly from artifactual to sociocultural research, bypassing the studies of chronology and of cultural and natural history; if they had done so, they would have deprived themselves of the opportunity to test assumptions made on the first and last levels by means of research on the intervening levels. All four levels are essential to the ultimate goal of archaeology, which is to learn as much as possible about humans in the past.

Irving Rouse

See also

Florida and the Caribbean, Historical Archaeology

References

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