Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

34 / Dacal Moure and Watters
chaeological explorations. Toward the end of the period, on February 18, 1958,
the Junta Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología was replaced by the Instituto
Cubano de Arqueología and the Comisión Nacional para la Preservación de
Monumentos Históricos y Artísticos, maintaining the same objectives under
separate research and regulatory branches.
THIRD STAGE: POST–NORTH AMERICAN
ARCHAEOLOGY IN CUBA (1959–2000)
The beginning of the third phase coincided with profound changes in Cuban
society that led to the foundation of the Department of Anthropology of the
Academia de Ciencias de Cuba in 1962. Four individuals played a central role
in its founding. The ¤rst, Antonio Núñez Jiménez, president of the Academia
de Ciencias, was a Ph.D. dedicated to geographical studies and, to a lesser
extent, archaeology. The second, René Herrera Fritot, was a professor of anthropology
and conservator of the Museo Antropológico Montané, with a
long record of archaeological investigations and an independent position.
Ernesto Tabío was an outstanding amateur archaeologist who had collaborated
with Herrera Fritot and the Grupo Guama. As a meteorologist, he
worked in the Organization of Civil Aviation of the United Nations in Lima,
Peru, where he collected objects and visited multiple archaeological sites. He
brought his experiences from this work and a strong in®uence from North
American archaeology, including the concept of settlement patterns. The
fourth in®uential ¤gure is Dr. Estrella Rey, a professor of history, whose work
focuses on the study of indigenous societies.
Although it was titled Department of Anthropology, in reality this organization
was dedicated for the most part to archaeology. At the time, archaeology
did not have a strong enough position within the disciplines of the
Cuban sciences to occupy an independent place in the Academia de Ciencias.
This situation changed with the publication of Prehistoria de Cuba by department
members E. Tabío and E. Rey (1966). The ¤rst author contributed an
overview of the culture history of the island in®uenced by North American
conceptions, and the latter wrote an ethnohistorical study, based on Marxist
historiography. In addition, the department conducted its own educational
effort to train archaeologists, culminating in the year 1970, when it granted
the ¤rst and only archaeology degrees to R. Dacal, J. M. Guarch, R. Payares,
and M. Pino.
In 1975, the Reunión de Teotihuacán began to shape the scholarly move-