Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

124 / Ulloa Hung
the case of Cuba, this tendency inferred socioeconomic changes from indirect
indexes such as productive tools or settlement patterns, owing to a lack of
analysis that could provide more concrete evidence.
• Close analytical perspectives that assumed a certain dependency between
technological analysis and cultural interpretations, where other elements
of the archaeological context are ignored.
• Descriptive, chronological perspectives based on simple classi¤cation of
the contexts according to a traditional taxonomy and predetermined characteristics.
• Multilineal positions where the previous perspectives are combined, but
where one of them is emphasized, especially the analytical perspective.
• Recent multilineal views, where the previous criteria are used as ways of
describing, analyzing, and evaluating the phenomenon in its variability and
spatial relations but disentangling it from regional manifestations and looking
at broader patterns.
(5) The unilineal approach that up to this date has dominated the classi¤cation,
study, and conceptualization of phenomena related to the Neolithic
transition in the Caribbean is related to the powerful sway that the traditional
classi¤cations of archaeological materials hold in this region. This approach
emphasizes aspects of a chronological and stylistic nature more than an analysis
of socioeconomic changes.
NOTES
1. Along the Caribbean coast of Central America, incipient ceramics are also
manifested in assemblages such as that from the Monkey Point site on the Atlantic
coast of Nicaragua and south of the Laguna de las Perlas (Veloz Maggiolo 1991).
2. Although Kozlowski did not discard the intercultural relationships between the
foraging communities in the Caribbean, they were evaluated in a technological, stylistic,
or formal sense, more than from an integral perspective or with a consideration
of changes in the core sociocultural structures.
3. An interesting example of this process is the site of Cueva de Berna where a
wide variety of tools is evident, suggesting a dense preceramic occupation that contained
characteristics from diverse cultural traditions. This site provides an example of
one of the earliest processes of hybridization in the Antilles—1890 b.c. At the end of
the occupation, ceramic fragments in the upper layers seem to indicate what pottery
was adopted.