Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Early Ceramics in the Caribbean / 119
In a similar vein, authors such as Venezuelan archaeologist Mario Sanoja
have pointed out similarities to the early Barrancas style and a possible in®uence
in the Antilles, while North Americans Betty Meggers and Clifford
Evans (n.d.) relate the pottery of El Caimito to other South American sites
and consider possible cultural transformations and diffusion processes. According
to Meggers and Evans, the ceramics of the El Caimito site exhibit
several of the diagnostic characteristics of early ceramics from South America,
especially the coastal complexes of Colombia, suggesting the possibility of
trans-Caribbean dispersion. This route seems to be related to climatic changes
that helped accelerate migration toward the Antilles.
Meggers (1987) documents the correspondence between the evidence for
migration and a long arid episode identi¤ed in palynological and geological
sequences that affected much of South America between 2700 and 2000 years
b.p. She suggests that the appearance of pottery at El Caimito might be the
result of a population movement toward the Antilles during the ¤nal phase of
this event. Understanding the interplay of climatic in®uences on migrations
through the Antillean arch with a phenomenon of cultural transcendency
constitutes an important observation in understanding the peopling of this
portion of the Caribbean. Nevertheless, a larger data set is still needed to
af¤rm the migration of the ¤rst ceramicist groups from the Colombian regions
to the Greater Antilles, and particularly to the island of Hispaniola.
The North American investigator Irving Rouse (1992) has also reevaluated
the presence of pottery in contexts characteristic of foraging communities.
His new theories have tried to reform the older schema to account for the
results of recent archaeological investigations in the Caribbean. The concepts
of “age” and “subseries” are the mechanisms he uses to assimilate new information
in order to adapt it to a persistent unilineal conception of technological
development and to demonstrate, through some changes in the assemblages,
shifts from one subseries or age to another are now conceived with a
greater chronological ®exibility. Under this view, the antecedents of Taíno culture
are divided into two ages, the Lithic or Paleoindian Age and the Archaic
or Mesoindian Age, each possessing a chronological range and de¤ned by the
appearance of a technological innovation—®intknapped stone for the Lithic
Age and ground stones, shell artifacts, and worked bone in the Archaic Age.
In this case, as in his earlier models, Rouse assumes that the archaeological
cultures diverged historically from an original common ancestral complex,
similar to the phylogenetic trees used in linguistics. From this point of view,
the changes in this model, produced by the divergent process, are explained