From Mayarí to “Protoagricola”: A Discussion on the Creation of Archaeological Cultures in Cuban and Dominican Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The diversity, complexity, and transformation of early settlers of the Caribbean are some of the main foci in current Caribbean archaeology. Since the 1960s, the presence of ceramics in some of these early contexts in Cuba and Hispaniola have generated new classifications and models where the ideas of diffusion, evolution, and transculturation dominate the explanations of this phenomenon. This has led to the creation of new cultures in both islands that impacted the traditional taxonomic and comprehension models of the early populations in the West Indies. This paper contextualizes and discusses the theoretical foci and how the archaeological evidence was managed in the creation of new cultures linked to this archaeological phenomenon in Cuba and Hispaniola. This paper also presents aspects of their current repercussion and questions that remain unanswered about the ceramic presence in the early archaeological contexts despite new advances and perspectives in studies of earlier populations in both islands and the Caribbean more generally.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38685.0