began in Santo Domingo, in support of restoration and interpretation efforts of the sixteenth-century section of the city. Excavations during this time contributed primarily to the mitigation of threatened sites, the interpretation of Spanish colonial presence to the tourist public, and the beginnings of the systematization of Spanish colonial material culture. The results of much of this work are summarized in a large and varied literature (see Nieves Sicart 1980; Ortega 1982; Pérez Montás 1984). Archaeology in Santo Domingo continued into the 1990s with much the same objectives, and was greatly stimulated in the 1980s by the observation of the Columbian Quincentenary (Veloz Maggiolo and Ortega 1992).

Spanish-Indian Interaction and Transculturation

Not all of the historical archaeology in Florida and the Caribbean was oriented toward descriptive or restoration goals during this period. Several pioneers of American historical archaeology, including Griffin, Smith, Goggin, José Cruxent, Francisco Prat Puig and Fairbanks developed active programs in Florida and the Caribbean between 1940 and 1960. They were explicitly interested in the mechanisms and consequences of European-American Indian contact, primarily from the perspective of the American Indians (see Smith 1956).

Among the most important elements of these programs were the Florida missions, which provided the focus for some of the first anthropologically oriented historical archaeology in the United States. In 1934, a historic-period Indian burial ground was discovered on the grounds of the Fountain of Youth Park tourist attraction in St. Augustine by archaeologist J. Ray Dickson, and the site was identified by smithsonian institution archaeologist Matthew Stirling as a probable Spanish mission. Archaeological and physical anthropological research at the mission site and surrounding areas has been carried out at the site intermittently since then for more than sixty years, not only focusing on the Timucua village associated with the mission, but also locating the original site of St Augustine (Chaney and Deagan 1989).

The focus of mission archaeology was explicitly defined by Griffin and Smith during the 1940s when they undertook the study of several seventeenth-century Spanish missions in order to better understand the responses of the Florida Indians to Spanish colonization and evangelization (Boyd, Smith, and Griffin 1951; Smith 1956). Recent assessments of this work, as well as syntheses of mission archaeology into the 1990s can be found in Thomas 1990, among others.

Questions of interaction and transculturation between Spaniards and American Indians in settings other than missions were the focus of considerable archaeological attention during the 1930s and 1940s, and were centered on Cuba, due largely to the influence of anthropologist Fernando Ortíz. Not only were a number of contact period Indian sites located and recorded, but some of the first explicit theoretical attention was paid to the processes of transculturation in the contact period (Ortíz 1983). This was largely owing to the activities of the Grupo Guamá, an organization of archaeologists committed to the archaeological investigation of Caribbean history, prehistory, and art. Organized and based in Cuba, the group also included archaeologists from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and North America, and sponsored projects and expeditions throughout the Caribbean Basin. The Grupo Guamá was active during the 1940s and 1950s, and during that time laid the groundwork for much subsequent Spanish colonial and contact-period Taino archaeology in the West Indies. This emphasis, too, has continued in Cuba to the present time (see Dominguez and Pantoja 1992; Fariñas Gutierrez 1992).

Tools of Chronology and Classification

A significant amount of pre-1970 historical archaeology in Florida and the Caribbean was undertaken specifically to develop classificatory and chronological tools. The most notable and broadly based of these efforts were Goggin’s comprehensive studies of Spanish majolica (a tin-enameled earthenware pottery) and Spanish Olive Jars (storage containers) (Goggin 1960a, and 1958, respectively). Goggin not only drew from existing collections but also initiated surveys,