Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Introduction / 21
America. Many times these collaborations have been done in informal ways
at the personal or lower institutional levels. For example, Cuban archaeologists
have gone to Puerto Rico to teach courses and work on projects, and
Dominican archaeologists have established strong links with their Cuban
counterparts with results such as the publication of the journal El Caribe Arqueológico.
There have also been some earlier efforts to improve contacts between
Cuban and North American colleagues, including exchange visits
sponsored by the University of Florida, the translation of The Art and Archaeology
of Pre-Columbian Cuba by Dacal Moure and Rivero de la Calle into
English by Watters and Sandweiss (1996; see also Sandweiss and Watters 1993;
Watters 1997; Watters and Dacal Moure 2002), as well as a highly successful
project conducted at the submerged site of Los Buchillones by a joint
Canadian/British and Cuban team (Calvera et al. 1996; Jardines and Calvera
1999; Pendergast 1997, 1998; Pendergast et al. 2001, 2002).
While these examples make it clear that some lines of friendship and communication
have breached the embargo, in most cases efforts have been at
lower levels of collaboration without having a lasting impact on knowledge
and practices. For example, the awareness that the average North American
archaeologist has of Cuban archaeology is still nil or ill founded. One way of
correcting the misconceptions that archaeologists of one country might have
about the other is to increase the rate of communication through publications.
It is true, as Lourdes Domínguez points out in her chapter, that Cuban
archaeologists are neither read nor cited by American archaeologists, but it is
also true that Cuban publications are not readily available in the United
States. Some national and international journals that have started to deal
with this problem are Latin American Antiquity in the United States (e.g., see
La Rosa Corzo 2003a) and El Caribe Arqueológico published by Casa del
Caribe in Cuba. Further, university presses recently have begun to publish
work by Cuban archaeologists, including the University of Pittsburgh Press
(Dacal Moure and Rivero de la Calle 1996), the University of North Carolina
Press, which is publishing a translation of La Rosa Corzo’s book on escaped
slaves (La Rosa Corzo 1991b, 2003b), and the University of Alabama Press
with this volume.
THIS VOLUME
The symposium and discussion forum that led to the publication of this volume
were originally organized by Shannon Dawdy and Gabino La Rosa