Crossing the Borders: New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean

Lithic Technology / 91
Figure 7.1. Location of the archaeological sites on
Guadeloupe and Martinique.
the major questions today: the distinction between early Cedrosan Saladoid and
Huecan Saladoid. 1 To do this I will present the results of a comparative analysis of
the early Cedrosan Saladoid débitages from Martinique and a Huecan collection
from the site of La Cathédrale de Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe (Figure 7.1).
Lithic Technology
Technological studies are supported by the conception of technical action as a fully
cultural one. Following the pioneering works of Marcel Mauss (1947), who has extended
the field of technical actions into body techniques, technological studies in
social sciences have been first developed by ethnologists. But very quickly archaeologists
have invested this new field of research, perfectly adapted to the nature of
their findings: the material expression of culture ( Leroi- Gourhan 1943, 1964). This
new approach was also, in the 1960s, an answer to the traditional way of characterizing
cultures that had been inspired by natural sciences and was based on the
identification of different guide fossils. Therefore, for a long time technological
studies have remained associated with a paleoethnological (synchronic) approach
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