Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Early Ceramics in the Caribbean / 113
6.3. Examples of ceramic decorations from the Belleza site, Santiago de Cuba
logical components. Sites with simple ceramics, certain lithic particularities,
shell assemblages, and coastal settlement patterns can be considered an early
protoagriculturalist phase, while assemblages with more complex ceramics, including
some with decorations (Figures 6.3 and 6.4), a signi¤cant lithic industry,
and inland settlement patterns can be de¤ned as late. This scheme is similar
to the approaches of Tabío. A circular logic inherent in the de¤nitions
means that variations can be overridden by environmental factors or different
modalities of the same archaeological culture.
Perhaps the most comprehensive and open attempt to evaluate these expressions
can be found in the work of José M. Guarch Estructura para las
comunidades aborígenes de Cuba (1990), in which the complexity of the phenomena
is sketched beyond mere classi¤cation. His generalizing approach to
the protoagricultural term attempts to establish differences in the organization
of the economic activities and technical complexes of early ceramic communities.
It also leaves open the possibility that this economic organization, as
well as the selection of the location of their settlements in the landscape, may
relate to different cultural traditions and not to different chronological periods.
In a general way, this phenomenon is evaluated as a phase within a period
of change in which the importance of the evolution and the in®uence of the
processes of transculturation are not discarded. To emphasize the observable
differences within these archaeological contexts as results of these processes,
the term variety was used, in which environmental factors played a signi¤cant
role.
A more recent line of thought (Godo 1997) has evaluated the problem
through a different optic. Considering protoagriculturalism as a differentiated
event seems to have been one of the main problems in studying its variability.
The direct relationship between the contexts of Canímar and Mayarí (where
one is deemed to be the antecedent of the other) repeated earlier assumptions
used to evaluate the foraging communities where the supposedly simple as-