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

188 / Newsom
house floors and other activity surfaces has enabled researchers to identify differences
in the types, distributions, and relative quantities of plant food items among
structures, that is, households, and to discern between food preparation, storage,
and consumption areas and activities. Hastorf’s (1988) work with ancient Peruvian
settlements is a good example. Deagan’s (2004) recent interpretation of ritual
(feasting, burial) and residence (elite, nonelite) contexts at En Bas Saline, Haiti,
emphasizing the nonrandom distribution of cultivated and wild plant taxa illustrates
the benefits of insights made possible due to having carried out very specific
sampling and recovery of plant remains. Some other sites in the region have been
sampled fairly intensively for plant macroremains— Maisabel, Luján I, Golden
Rock, Anse à la Gourde, to name a few— and the samples have been analyzed or
are in various stages of analysis. In general we need to apply this more broadly to
achieve greater resolution of the archaeobotanical record in the Caribbean, including
point sampling across house floors and activity surfaces (Pearsall 2000:73),
in conjunction with the feature and stratum sampling that is already done, and be
attentive to matching the size (volume) of samples with the size of the contexts
sampled (i.e., larger features should as a general rule be sampled in greater volume;
we standardize according to volume later in the laboratory for intersample comparisons).
The benefits of factoring in and planning for both micro- and macrobotanical
analyses, as complementary data sets, should be self- evident by now.
Can we locate those home gardens and crop venues inferred or hypothesized
through the archaeobotany and the ethnohistoric documents? Consider that Amerindian
groups in the Upper Orinoco, Venezuela, grow two partially domesticated
species of Solanum (the potato and nightshade genus), including individual varieties
of each, but those of one species are cultivated in swidden plots and those of
the other in home gardens; the distinction as to venue is based on economic use
and domestication status, the latter as recognized and defined by the native cultivators
(Volpato et al. 2004). Can we discern equivalent distinctions and patterns of
cultivation and use in the ancient Caribbean, perhaps even the behique’s nexus of
activity, including any specially groomed habitats or gardens for the plants central
to his or her practice? Can we finally associate specific assemblages of food items
and other economic plants with individual dwellings, particular households, or
separate social segments? These are all achievable goals, but they will never be realized
unless we make a directed effort to do so. We can only achieve such an exacting
level of resolution of the archaeobotanical record by instituting a broad and
appropriately tuned sampling effort combined with suitable recovery procedures
(fine sieving, flotation, direct collection, depending on the material and the depositional
environment).
Somewhat similarly, wet- site archaeology has great potential to illuminate Caribbean
paleoethnobotany and any number of broader issues due to the more
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