ABOUT THIS BOOK

A long sequence of social, cultural, and political processes characterizes an ever-dynamic Caribbean history. The Caribbean Basin is home to numerous linguistic and cultural traditions and fluid interactions that often map imperfectly onto former colonial and national traditions. Although much of this contact occurred within the confines of local cultural communities, regions, or islands, they nevertheless also include exchanges between islands, and in some cases, with the surrounding continents. recent research in the pragmatics of seafaring and trade suggests that in many cases long-distance intercultural interactions are crucial elements in shaping the social and cultural dynamics of the local populations.

The contributors to Islands at the Crossroads include scholars from the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe who look beyond cultural boundaries and colonial frontiers to explore the complex and layered ways in which both distant and more intimate sociocultural, political, and economic interactions have shaped Caribbean societies from seven thousand years ago to recent times.

Contributors

Douglas V. Armstrong / Mary Jane Berman / Arie Boomert / Alistair J. Bright / Richard T. Callaghan / L. Antonio Curet / Mark W. Hauser / Corinne L. Hofman / Menno L. P. Hoogland / Kenneth G. Kelly / Sebastiaan Knippenberg / Ingrid Newquist / Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo / Reniel Rodríquez Ramos / Alice V. M. Samson / Peter E. Siegel / Christian Williamson

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

L. Antonio Curet is an assistant curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Field Museum; the author of Caribbean Paleodemography: Population, Culture History, and Sociopolitical Processes in Ancient Puerto Rico; and coeditor, with Lisa M. Stringer, of Tibes: People, Power, and Ritual at the Center of the Cosmos. Mark W. Hauser is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica.

REVIEWS

“Curet and Hauser’s volume provides a sophisticated assessment of both Caribbean history and prehistory through the lens of interaction—the consequential ways that different groups of people intersected with one another on different scales and at different times from 5000 BC to the recent past. The individual papers address this overarching theme and present new data and interpretations. It’s an important collection for Caribbeanists, archaeologists in the Caribbean Basin, and archaeologists working in the Colonial Americas.” —Samuel M. Wilson, author of The Archaeology of the Caribbean

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"This volume brings together a wide range of interesting essays that speak to the concept of Caribbean interactions. A valuable contribution to Caribbean archaeology, it provides a provocative framework for understanding the nature of Caribbean relationships that undermines the insular nature of traditional archaeological work in the region." —New West Indian Guide

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"Focusing on human relationships and the interactions between various groups and subgroups, this collection of essays expouding on the nature and history of the Caribbean peoples and geography gives insight into its changing social climate over time." —Book News

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

List of Illistrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Migration, Seafaring, and Cultural Contact in the Caribbean

I. Peoples and Boundaries:Systematics and the Practiceof Caribbean Archaeology

1. Irving Rouse's Contribution to American Archaeology: The Case of Migration

2. The Ghost of Caliban: Island Archaeology, Insular Archaeologists, and the Caribbean

3. Colonies without Frontiers: Inter-island Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Caribbean

II. Tracing Exchange: Intensitiesand Scales of Interaction

4. Patterns of Contact between the Islands of the Caribbean and the Surrounding Mainland as a Navigation Problem

5. Ties with the Homelands: Archipelagic Interaction and the Enduring Role ofthe South and Central American Mainlands in the Pre- Columbian Lesser Antilles

6. Contraband in the Convento? : Material Indications of Trade Relations in the Spanish Colonies

7. Good as Gold: The Aesthetic Brilliance of the Lucayans

III. Redefining Boundaries through Social Interaction

8. The Magens House, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies: Archaeology of an Urban House Compound and Its Relationship to Local Interactions and Global Trade

9. Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind

10. Competitive Polities and Territorial Expansion in the Caribbean

11. Islands at the Crossroads: Archaeology of Interaction in the Caribbean

References

List of Contributors

Index