Caribbean archaeology was not established until 1965 with the name “The International Congress for the Study of pre-Columbian Man in the Lesser Antilles,” and the first congress paper with an explicitly historical-archaeological theme was not included in the Congress Proceedings until 1977 (Garcia Arévalo1978b). In 1979 the archaeologists in the region decided to change the name of the congress to “The International Congress for Caribbean Archaeology” to reflect the broader temporal and geographical interests of archaeology in the Caribbean that developed after 1970.

Historical Archaeology, 1970–1990

Historical archaeology in both Florida and the Caribbean region expanded considerably in scope and in intensity after 1970 as a consequence of political and professional developments at both the international and regional levels. The decade of the 1960s was one of widespread political change in the Caribbean, with seven British colonial nations gaining independence between 1962 and 1974 and the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959. These events ultimately directed historical archaeology toward questions of colonialism and American cultural identity near the end of the period.

One of the most influential professional developments was the gradual formalization through the 1960s of American historical archaeology as a distinct discipline, with the expansion of the Conference on Historic Sites Archaeology, and the formal establishment of the society for historical archaeology in 1967 (see South 1994). The latter event marked the advent of a conscious self-identification of historical archaeology as a social science distinct from both prehistoric archaeology and from history, with its own set of theoretical and methodological principles, and therefore a distinct set of guiding questions. One of the most important of these for historical archaeology in the circum-Caribbean was the explicit general recognition that the encounter between Europe and America—which first took place in this region—was one between literate and nonliterate people, and that systematic investigation of that world-changing process required both archaeological and documentary information. Historical archaeology was the only field that developed and articulated such an approach.

Archaeologists working in Cuba had been among the first to explicitly address these issues, as well as others that focussed on colonialism. The Cuban revolution of 1958 promoted active attention among Cuban historians and archaeologists toward questions of cultural origins and national identity. For much of the subsequent three decades, during which cold war politics dominated the globe, Cuban historical archaeology was relatively isolated from the rest of the Caribbean. Cuban archaeologists during this period continued to work on the questions of transculturation and social dynamics posed during the previous period by the Grupo Guamá, but their inquiries came to be informed by Marxist theory and a concern with the dialectics of property and class considerably before these paradigms emerged in mainstream American archaeology.

The formalization of historical archaeology coincided with the emergence and general acceptance of what came to be known as the new archaeology, which called for attention to dynamic cultural processes rather than to the structural culture histories that had dominated earlier periods (see Dunnell 1986). These concerns had a profound effect on the kinds of questions asked by historical as well as pre-Columbian archaeologists in Florida and in the Caribbean, and in the methods used to answer them. Subsistence strategies and environmental adaptations, for example, figured prominently in frameworks for investigation, and required the incorporation of multidisciplinary specialists in the natural sciences in addition to those in history and architecture. Although some interdisciplinary research, such as Elizabeth Wing’s pioneering study of food remains from Nueva Cádiz (1961), had been carried out in the Caribbean and Florida before 1970 the involvement of multidisciplinary scholars did not become standard in the historical archaeology of the region until after about 1975.

A third important influence on historical archaeology throughout the Americas during this period was the increased consciousness of and