Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

Frameworks for Caribbean Prehistory / 39
ley of Hispaniola (which Maggiolo agrees did take place) was essentially “the
product of socio- economic development,” in which the exploitation of the
freshwater turtle may have played a special role (Veloz Maggiolo 1979:55–56).
Without naming names, but surely with Rouse in mind, the editor of Volume
1 of the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean, J. Sued- Badillo, complained
that archaeologists had “failed to articulate regionally intelligible nomenclatures.”
The “identities” that have been created, such as Saladoid and
Ostionoid, since they are derived from pottery, in his opinion are “dehumanized.”
“They conflict with the historical documentation and even with common
sense” ( Sued- Badillo 2003:3, 259). In that vein, P. Hulme, reviewing a
book by F. Moscoso, one of the contributors to the UNESCO volume, had already
voiced the claim that the “lengthy dominance of the Yale account” had
“stultified Caribbean studies” (Hulme 1988).
L. A. Curet, in his summary of the situation (2004), agreed that, in part because
of the dominance of the Rouse scheme, the Caribbean had become “one
of the backwaters of modern archaeology.” It had, for example, virtually missed
out on the discussion of island archaeology as such that occupied archaeologists
in other areas in the 1970s and 1980s. He specifically did not suggest that
Rouse’s chronological model should be “completely discarded,” but he emphasized
its limitations when dealing with issues “other than migration and cultural
sequences.” There were other levels of analysis that needed to be taken
into account, such as individuals, households, kinship groups, and communities.
The scheme could not deal with that, nor was Rouse’s assumption that his
units were necessarily homogeneous at all justified. Above all (as the New Archaeologists
would certainly have said) his classificatory system had “no explanatory
potential.”
By far the most sustained attack on Rouse’s scheme has however been mounted
by W. F. Keegan. The first phase of this attack was contained in three review articles
on “West Indian Archaeology” published in the Journal of Archaeological
Research and in a paper he presented to IACA in 1999 (Keegan 1994, 1996,
2000, 2001). The main points arising from these articles may be summarized
as follows.
1. The lines drawn in Rouse’s charts are not as reliable as they appear. Insofar
as they rest on radiocarbon dates, they do not take account of calibration.
The tendency is for calibrated dates in the period between the first
and fifteenth centuries a.d. to be somewhat younger than their uncalibrated
counterparts. The effect of taking account of calibration would not