Research in these towns has concentrated on cultural interaction among Spanish, American Indian, and African residents and the resulting syncretic and newly developed criollo forms. In all of the excavations that have been so far reported from these sites, a pattern of differential adoption and incorporation of Amerindian and/or African traits along gender lines has been documented in Spanish households. The archaeological record suggests that this admixture included the incorporation of Amerindian elements in non–socially visible, infrastructural areas, such as diet and food preparation, while visible symbols of social identification remained rigidly Spanish. Even after the extinction of the native Taino and related Amerindian people in the Caribbean, Spanish colonists continued to incorporate non-European traits into their households, replacing Indian contributions with African.

Subsistence studies have been central to these interpretations. Faunal analysis in historical archaeology was pioneered during the 1970s by Elizabeth Wing (1961, 1989) and her students working in Florida and the Caribbean, notably Elizabeth Reitz (1979, 1990). Zooarchaeological analysis is now a standard part of historical archaeology throughout the region. The use of floral remains has been an even more recent development.

The Non-Spanish Caribbean

The attention to multicultural transculturation and integration that has pervaded the post-1970 historical archaeology of Spanish-occupied areas has not been as pronounced in the English, French, or Dutch colonial sites of the region. This is at least partly owing to the developmental histories of both Euro-American societies in these areas and the historical archaeology that occurred there. By the time many of the seventeenth-century English, French, and Dutch colonies were established, the resident Amerindian populations had been severely decimated, thereby reducing the opportunities for cultural exchange. The populations of these areas came quickly to be dominated by people of African origin, brought for the most part unwillingly to the Caribbean and Florida as slaves (see Dunn 1972). The non-Spanish colonial occupations of the Caribbean and Florida Basin were furthermore dominated by dispersed plantation systems, in contrast to the more centralized towns that characterized the Spanish colonies, and this led to different approaches to the archaeological database.

Systematic historical archaeology first took place in these areas during the 1970s and 1980s and was informed by the methodological advances of cultural resources management that pervaded American archaeology in general. These advances emphasized regional settlement patterns and broad-scale surveys and were particularly appropriate for the problems related to plantation economies. Much of the initial work in these areas was thus devoted to survey and inventory, such as that done in Barbuda and Antigua (Clement 1995); St. Eustatius (Barka 1985); Montserrat (Goodwin 1982); Jamaica (Higman 1991); the Virgin Islands (Righter 1990) and Curacao (Haviser and Simmons-Brito 1991).

Although some archaeological attention has been devoted to European towns—most notably Spanish Towne and Port Royal, Jamaica, Oranjestad, St. Eustatius (Barka 1985), and more recently in the Guyanas to contact period Amerindian sites (Petitjean Roget 1991)—historical archaeology in the non-Spanish Caribbean has for the most part concentrated on plantations rather than on towns, with particular attention paid to slave settlements and to agricultural industrial systems.

Some of the earliest explicit archaeological attention to sugar production remains took place in Florida, with the study and excavation of the eighteenth-century Bulow sugar plantation. Intermittent projects in industrial archaeology took place at sugar installations in the Caribbean after that time; however, it was the advent of resource management surveys and historic preservation in the region after about 1980 that focused attention on industrial aspects of the Caribbean sugar plantations (see Eubanks 1993).

African Heritage

Some of the earliest historical archaeology in the hemisphere to explicitly address issues of African