questions, and anthropological problems over the past century, during which changing social philosophies, national interests, and technologies have additionally affected the orientations and outcomes of archaeology (see Patterson 1991; Sued Badillo 1996). Despite recent criticism that historical archaeology in the region has been unfruitful and dominated by concerns defined by European hegemony (Sued Badillo 1992), twentieth-century historical archaeological research in Florida and the Caribbean has, in fact, addressed questions of internal development, indigenous American identity and colonialism for several decades.

The following discussion of the history of that work in the Caribbean and Florida is ordered in a general way by the chronology of archaeological research in the region; however, it should be emphasized that equally important organizational distinctions for historical archaeology in the Caribbean are provided by the dominant postcontact cultural distinctions of the region—that is, American Indian, African, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch—as well as by the traditional geographic distinctions—that is, the Lesser Antilles, the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas, Florida, and the mainland Caribbean coasts. These will be incorporated as necessary.

The chronology of circum-Caribbean historical archaeology is organized here for convenience by four somewhat artificial and overlapping periods, which nevertheless correspond roughly to paradigmatic and political developments in the region. These include: (1) the period before 1935 and the formalization of professional archaeology, (2) the years of ca. 1935–1970, (3) the period between ca. 1970 and 1990, and (4) the Quincentennial-dominated post-1985 period.

Historical Archaeology before 1935

A few essentially archaeological studies of post-Columbian sites took place in Florida and the Caribbean before 1930; however these were generally undertaken by historians or other nonspecialists to commemorate the anniversary of a historic event or a famous European person. In 1767 for example, the French geographer Moreau de St. Mery attempted through survey and collection to locate and identify the site of La Navidad, the first fort that Columbus was forced to establish in Haiti after the wreck of the Santa Maria in 1492. In the process, he inadvertently identified the site of Puerto Real, a sixteenth-century Spanish town, as La Navidad (Moreau de St. Mery 1958; Hodges 1995). Another early archaeological effort to study Columbus was that commissioned by the North American Commission for the Observance of the Columbian Quadricentennial in 1891. The U.S. Navy vessel Enterprise was sent to the site of La Isabela in the Dominican Republic, which was the first settlement intentionally established by Christopher Columbus in the Americas. The site was surveyed, mapped, and described by Navy Lt. Colvocorresses (Thatcher 1903).

Little historical archaeology was attempted in Florida or the Caribbean Basin during the early twentieth century, and most information about postcontact archaeological sites was buried as footnotes or ancillary observation in studies of pre-Columbian sites (e.g., Hatt 1932). One notable exception to this was the work of William Goodwin in Jamaica. A businessman who went to the West Indies in 1915 to recover from nervous prostration, Goodwin began a long-term study of the early Spanish and English ruins of Jamaica, occasionally studying presumed Spanish ruins in Florida as a comparison (Goodwin 1946). Between 1911 and 1937 he mapped and excavated a series of colonial sites on the island, including what was probably the first underwater search for Columbus’s caravel ships (Goodwin 1946, 46–55), and collaborated with local collectors and antiquarians to document many of Jamaica’s historic colonial remains. It was not until after 1935, however, that the largely idiosyncratic interest in monumental sites and highly visible historical events manifested by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century investigators coalesced into the discipline of archaeology in Florida and the Caribbean. From this time onward, historical archaeology was practiced consistently, if eclectically, in the region.

1935 to ca. 1970

Some of the earliest explicitly intentional historical archaeology in the Americas was carried