Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

42 / Berman, Febles, and Gnivecki
3.1. Welcome sign, a billboard in central Cuba. Photograph by Mary Jane Berman.
In Cuba, archaeology is conceptualized as belonging either to prehistory or
to the historic era (Fernández Leiva 1992). The division is temporal and is
structured by the kinds of questions asked and the methods employed for
each period. Broadly de¤ned, prehistoric archaeology begins with the earliest
peopling of the island and ends with Spanish colonization, and historical archaeology
is concerned with the Spanish colonial period, which extends to the
late nineteenth century. We focus here on the practice of prehistoric archaeology,
although some methods associated with it, such as zooarchaeological
analyses, have recently been extended to the archaeology of the historic period
(Kepecs 2002:47). Two texts in English (Dacal Moure and Rivero de la Calle
1996; Davis 1996), and numerous Cuban works (e.g., Tabío and Rey 1979)
address contemporary Cuban archaeology’s method and theory and current
reconstructions of its culture history. While Cuban site reports typically include
osteological data, we will not discuss how physical anthropology is conducted
in Cuba; the reader is referred to Blakey (2001), Goodwin (1978), and
Wienker (2001).
In Cuba, as elsewhere, past cultures live in the public and commercial
imagination. Throughout the countryside, roadside billboards depicting idealized
views of Native American and African communities welcome travelers
to today’s communities (Figure 3.1). The Taíno chief, Hatuey, who some call