Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

108 / Ulloa Hung
not mean that each group underwent an identical development, the emergence
of a ceramic tradition does highlight a signi¤cant and complex process
that should not be explained using merely diffusionist or chronological approaches.
THE ANTILLES: THE CASES OF CUBA
AND DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The Island of Cuba
Until the 1970s, Caribbean archaeology had focused almost exclusively on the
ceramics of farming communities that arrived in the Lesser Antilles around
the third century b.c. from northeastern Venezuela. The chronological and
spatial outline created by North American archaeologist Irving Rouse and
Spanish archaeologist José M. Cruxent (1961) was one of the most comprehensive
attempts to consider variations in this type of industry. Their de¤nition
of styles and series arising from technical, stylistic, and chronological
studies created a model that attempted to explain ceramic transformations
through the construction of a phylogenetic tree for the Caribbean Basin based
on historic/evolutionary development. However, when this “tree” is studied at
a more localized level, local sequences tended to be unilineal. Type sites in the
model provided examples from which the rest of the cultural characteristics
could be inferred. On occasions, assemblages were forced into a certain style
or series without considering other reasons for variation, such as migration by
the ceramists or the local development of new pottery traditions.
This schematic research approach affected investigations of foraging communities.
The meaning of the term Ciboney, coined by the early Spanish
chronicles for hunter and gatherer groups and later developed as an archaeological
cultural term by the North American investigator Mark R. Harrington
(1935), was expanded and divided into two cultural traditions based on the
Cuban sites of Cayo Redondo and Guayabo Blanco. Through the anthropological
prism of North American historical particularism, the general designation
Ciboney, combined with the considerations of so-called diagnostic objects,
established a supposed and necessary evolution from one aspect to
another that spanned several chronological periods that did not include the
development of a ceramic tradition. Further, the classi¤cation created for Cuban
foraging groups was considered a valid model for the rest of the Antilles,
and the differences and variations between settlements within the same category
were obscured. The few ceramics found in contexts classi¤ed as Ciboney