Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Early Ceramics in the Caribbean / 109
were considered atypical, intrusive, unimportant, or, at best, an expression of
cultural superimposition by agricultural groups in multicomponent sites. This
lineal and obligatory typology that only valued certain types of artifacts and
cultural characteristics ignored the possible interactions between different
technological and economic traditions or expressions of variability within the
foraging lifeway. In this way, the process of transculturation and in®uential
ecological elements that could have either delayed or accelerated many evolutionary
processes were not fully evaluated.
The 1960s and 1970s were marked by important trends in the conception
of cultural evolution in the Caribbean. Studies carried out at the sites of
Arroyo del Palo and Mejías in eastern Cuba began a new stage and a new way
of approaching the emergence of pottery in Cuban archaeology. The consideration
of these locations—mainly Arroyo del Palo—as expressions of a new
culture (Tabío and Guarch 1966) that coexisted with the last expressions of
the so-called Ciboney Cayo Redondo and the ¤rst of the Subtaíno agricultural
groups was driven by an interest in locating a context in which elements characteristic
of the foraging lifeway converged with the presence of ceramics. Up
to that moment, except for the studies by Felipe Pichardo Moya (1990) and a
few others, pottery had been considered one of the fundamental indicators of
a culturally advanced Neolithic stage among Cuba’s aboriginal communities,
without leaving room for sui generis expressions of the transitional process.
The consideration of pottery from Mayarí as a marginal expression of the
so-called Ostionoid series (Tabío and Guarch 1966:75), with chronology between
the ninth and eleventh centuries a.d. (Tabío and Rey 1979), added to
doubts about the classi¤cation of early ceramicists. The identi¤cation of
Mayarí as a new culture (Córdova n.d.) spurred examinations of similar archaeological
assemblages as expressions of differentiated groups, independent
of their archaic associations. The discovery and study of other sites with very
simple ceramics and foraging technologies, among them the Aguas Verdes
(Febles 1991; Kozlowski 1972), Canímar (Febles 1982), and Playitas (Dacal
Moure 1986) sites, added another perspective to the criteria developed from
considerations of the so-called Mayarí culture. In this case, the center of attention
shifted to the lithic industry whose particularities became the signature
used to follow these communities in their treks through the different
regions of the island (Figure 6.2). Classi¤cations resulting from the lithic studies
served as the basis to support supposed cultural differentiations but also
reproduced a unilineal development scheme that had so long been used to
describe foraging groups. Approaches to the lithic industry show the direct