Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Early Ceramics in the Caribbean / 105
collaboration with the National Geographic Society in the United States.
They were conducted in phases. The ¤rst took place between 1996 and 1997
and involved the participation of Cuban and Dominican researchers. The
second occurred between 1999 and 2001 and was developed by archaeological
research teams from La Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba and the
Departamento Centro Oriental de Arqueología del Ministerio de Ciencias,
Tecnología y Medioambiente. The ¤rst research phase concentrated on the
discovery and study of deposits with early ceramics in southeastern Cuba; the
second phase intensi¤ed studies in this area while also extending the survey to
northwestern Cuba. The goal of the second phase was to compose a regional
and comparative view of both areas. The ¤nal results of these projects are
discussed in more detail in a monograph titled Cerámica temprana en el centro
del oriente de Cuba recently published in Dominican Republic by Jorge Ulloa
Hung and Roberto Valcárcel Rojas (2002).
REGIONAL BACKGROUND
Although research on the beginnings of agriculture in the Americas tends to
focus on this economic practice as the de¤ning element of the transition into
the Neolithic, pottery continues to interest specialists. Ceramics have received
a great deal of attention in the archaeology of the hemisphere, justi¤ed not
only because of the amount of information that this type of evidence provides
but also because in many regions climatic conditions affecting preservation
mean that scarcely any other type of material is found. Until some decades
ago, early ceramics in archaeological contexts in the Americas were interpreted
under two alternative views: they could be seen as either intrusive and
introduced, or, contrarily, they could become the focus of an analysis that
obviated the rest of the contextual information to become a unilineal, de¤ning
cultural feature.
Recent evaluations of foraging societies at several sites on the American
continent support the possibility that societies with widely variable lifeways
utilized pottery. In many cases, it was obtained through exchange. In others,
it was manufactured in a systematic manner that expanded the economic and
productive possibilities of its makers (Angulo 1992; Hoopes 1994; MacNeish
1992; Politis et al. 2001; Rímoli and Nadal 1983; Scott et al. 1991; Smith 1995;
Veloz Maggiolo 1991; Williams 1992). In Caribbean environments rich in
fauna, foraging societies in several regions developed a high population density
that created conditions for a sedentary or semisedentary life. Fixed or