Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

The Ceramic Art of Agricultural Groups in the Antilles / 161
access to the ¤eld of indigenous thought and cosmology. I align myself with
Navarrete (1990), who values the importance of ceramic decorations and their
symbolic codes as an expression of ethnicity; with Curet (1991), when he outlines
the utility of studying symbols used by the chie®y elite and symbols that
identify political groups; and with Oliver’s (1998) efforts to decipher the “syntaxes”
(motifs, designs), “semantics” (meanings), and pragmatisms (function
or use) of the petroglyphs and ceremonial center at Caguana. I support all of
those who work in this vein. It will be of great importance to consolidate an
archaeological semiology that integrates general ¤ndings from the archaeological
contexts. In that way, the textual interpretations of artistic forms
would be justi¤ed by their social and ideological roots.
As a starting point, I think we need to establish a database of images that,
preferably, could be contextualized in time and space and that could be manipulated
with statistical treatment. Obviously, the objective is not simply to
store and classify the data but to convert it into a documentation of the historic
trajectory of artistic forms and the social practices of the people that
produced them. We should not evaluate the record of the images and their
symbolic meaning through the lens of our own conceptual categories or from
ethnocentric perspectives. The theoretical and methodological interpretation
of the structured texts involves approaching the cosmology of the indigenous
people in the terms of their own system of representations, one that belongs
to a concrete cultural tradition. It is necessary to decipher the particular
mechanisms of the productions of symbols and the systems of symbols as
suggested by Saussure (1973:60) in order to get to know their meaning and
the “laws that govern them.” In our case, this refers to the speci¤c nonlinguistic
symbols articulated in a system, their relations, and their meanings.
I owe many debts in my research to Olmos (1991), who has worked with
the Iberic iconography, especially regarding the development of a corpus of
images for the reconstruction of the original paradigms and interpretation of
the systems of representations. Olmos also argues for the necessity of cataloguing
minimal formal units, even ones that many times are considered
simple decorative elements but that, in certain contexts, combined with other
elements, generate truly meaningful units. In this respect, it is important to
recall the criteria developed by García Arévalo (1989) for symbolic geometric
units that acquire their contextual meaning when found articulated with quite
¤gurative representations in particular objects.
Although not conclusive, my analysis has applied these principles to the
motifs and themes in our history of turtles, frogs, and crying ¤gures. In the
same way, I have contributed to the study of artistic expression as “text” and