Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

180 / La Rosa Corzo
machetes and a hoe, a shackle, buttons, and especially glass containers (bottles and
damajuanas or demijohn), vitreous stoneware bottles, and ceramic olive jars. These
artifacts were found inside the shelters where human activity centered around the ¤re
pits, which were always the richest areas in items of material culture.
6. This systematic has been applied with excellent results in studies of zooarchaeological
remains of colonial sites by Laura Beovide (1995) and Pintos and Gianatti
(1995). For my part, I followed the criteria suggested by Morales Muñiz (1989).
7. On this topic, folklore writer Cirilo Villaverde af¤rmed that in 1839 slaves maintained
the ¤re perennially and that “they sleep and spend long hours of the night
around its heat” (Villaverde 1961:18). Federica Bremer, who visited numerous slavebased
plantations of Cuba in the middle of the nineteenth century, asserted that the
Africans of the island could not live without ¤re, “even amid the hottest heat spell;
and they like to light it in the ®oor, in [the] middle of the rooms” (Bremer 1980
[1851]:190).
8. Many historical sources document the predilection that Africans and their descendants
acquired for the consumption of fresh hutía meat which they used to expand
their alimentary rations from the slave haciendas. They also had a preference for
tasajo (salted meat imported from Buenos Aires) and for bacalao (salted cod¤sh).
9. Arará is an ethnic denomination and not the name of an ethnic group. The
term was used by slave traders to identify slaves from the regions of Togo and Benin
but that included people from numerous ethnic groups such as the Ewe, Fon, Adja,
and Ayizo.
10. This well-known authority on Cuban slave plantations assumed that the daily
meat consumption of an adult slave was higher than 200 g, providing 70 g of animal
protein, 13 g of fat, and 382 calories in addition to the daily 500 g of ®our, which he
considered more than enough for daily labor.