towns in British-dominated areas to vacant lands in Florida (Fairbanks 1978, 171). The Seminoles furthermore formed close alliances and lived together with African runaways.

The archaeological study of Seminole sites was actually initiated before 1970 by Goggin, who incorporated Seminole archaeology into his overall schemes of cultural evolution and chronology in Florida and defined archaeological manifestations of Seminole culture for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Goggin 1958). His colleagues and students subsequently became interested in aspects of Seminole-European interaction (Gluckman and Peebles 1974), and by the 1990s there was increased archaeological interest in Black Seminoles (Harron 1994). Archaeological work that took place between 1970 and 1990 to better understand Seminole cultural formation and development has been synthesized by Weisman (1989).

Much of the archaeological attention to African influence in the colonial Caribbean has focused on Afro-American ceramic traditions. One of the earliest inquiries into this question was that of Duncan Matthewson, who correlated locally made folk pottery in Jamaica with West African ceramic traditions. Since that time, African-Caribbean ceramic traditions have been studied in a number of areas, including Cuba (Dominguez 1980), Haiti (Smith 1986), Jamaica (Eubanks 1993), and the lesser Antilles (Heath 1988; Peterson and Watters 1988). Like those of Ferguson and others in the southeastern United States, these investigations concluded not only that African influence was considerably more pronounced in the material world of post-Columbian American society than has traditionally been acknowledged, but also that African contributions are most accurately understood through historical archaeology (rather than through history or archaeology alone). This has been especially relevant in the Caribbean region, where African influence in the Americas persists most visibly in the syncretic societies of the twentieth century.

Historical Archaeology in the 1990s

The 1990s in Florida and the Caribbean were marked by the convergence of nationalist ideology in the Caribbean and by postmodernist thought (“postprocessualism”) in historical archaeology. A focus for this convergence was provided by the 1992 Quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage, which marked the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas and provoked not only an enormous increase in attention to the Caribbean past but also a great deal of support for historical archaeology in the region.

Postprocessualism gained ascendancy as a major paradigmatic addition to historical archaeology in the 1980s, and in fact, much of the Quincentenary-related archaeological research informed by postprocessual thought was initiated and largely carried out in the 1980s. Postprocessualism of the 1980s objected to “reductionist” approaches designed to provide a generalized expression or description of cultural behavior (such as statistical correlations reflecting group characteristics), and especially to efforts to arrive at general statements or lawlike generalizations about past behavior. These activities were perceived essentially as masking the true internal diversity of a society as represented by the individuals who constituted it, and as inevitably communicating the prevailing dominant perspective while burying the roles of resistance and individual variation. Individual actions and decisions were seen as more important and influential than group norms or environmental variables in shaping societies and the archaeological records they leave. The postprocessualist approach is concerned with individual decisions and acts—rather than systemic processes or environmental factors—that reflect, mitigate, or enforce the unending cycle in societies of efforts by both individuals and groups to assert social dominance in some cases and to resist it in others (see Little 1994; Paynter and McGuire 1991; Schmidt and Patterson 1996).

Despite claims to the contrary by at least one Caribbean ethnohistorian (Sued Badillo 1992), the coincidence of the Quincentenary with the entry into the mainstream of postprocessual thought provoked many historical archaeologists throughout the Caribbean to turn attention toward questions of modern Caribbean cultural identity, the historical roles of non-European