Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

38 / Chapter 3.
would be referred to as a classic “ culture- historical” model, of a rather rigid
kind, based on pottery typology, unchanged in its essentials for 50 years. As
such, it has acquired the characteristics of a dogma, and has been presented as
such. All around in the world of archaeology there has been change, but it has
not changed. Rouse himself was well aware of this. As he rather disarmingly
proclaimed in his last book The Tainos, “My generation of archaeologists was
trained to proceed solely in terms of artifacts and the cultures to which they
belonged” (1992:69). He also took into consideration “the peoples who possessed
the cultures,” but otherwise he saw no reason to change his ways. As he
confessed to Siegel, he had always been drawn toward taxonomy rather than
ecology, and he was never really interested in the excavation of archaeological
sites either (Siegel 1996:671–672, 686). That left the “accumulation of a succession
of chronological charts” as what he considered to be his principal contribution
to archaeology over the years. Since he also confessed to being a “normative”
archaeologist, with an “inductive” strategy, it was scarcely surprising
that, as he said himself, he became “a whipping boy of the New Archaeologists”
of the 1960s and after (Siegel 1996:677–678). To his credit, Rouse refused to
be fazed by all of this, but nonetheless it is clear why some now feel that it is
time to start again in the West Indies.
Alternatives to Rouse’s Scheme
From time to time, some authors have expressed discontent regarding aspects of
the Rouse system, and others have voiced dissatisfaction with the entire framework,
but in a general way without really proposing an alternative. Thus, following
his excavations in Cuba, particularly at Levisa, J. K. Kozlowski proposed
the creation of a Paleo- Indian (Preceramic) “ Seboruco- Mordán culture”
based on “the typological and technological analysis of stone industries” (Kozlowski
1975; 1980). His study differed, as he said, in its methods and results,
“above all, because it has been written from the standpoint of the Old World,”
that is, traditional European Paleolithic archaeology. He got no thanks for
this, because, as A. Gus Pantel put it (in Sued- Badillo 2003:122), “his application
of European continental typologies on the West Indian assemblages has
resulted in a stereotyping of the early inhabitants of the islands.” Veloz Maggiolo
(1979) by contrast emphasized the importance of the environment, and
demonstrated that there was no automatic correlation between types of ceramics
and settlement patterns, the latter by implication being much more significant.
Thus the “drastic change” from Ostionoid to Meillacoid in the Cibao val-