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Abstract
The Caribbean Sea was centre stage in the earliest, sustained encounters between the New and Old Worlds, heralding the mass movement of people, goods and ideas between two previously unconnected parts of the world. The repercussions of this are woven into the fabric of modern multi-ethnic Caribbean society. However, our current understanding of this important chapter in world history is skewed due to large shortfalls in our knowledge of indigenous agencies in these encounters. A trans-disciplinary field of research, based on the synergy of archaeological and network approaches towards local contexts, provides fresh insights into how indigenous agency developed during these encounters, particularly in terms of migration, mobility and interaction dynamics. The present article illustrates how four indigenous Caribbean communities (re-)negotiated, adapted and integrated their multi-scalar social networks prior to and in the course of the different phases of the colonization process.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. Sarah Inskip is thanked for correcting the original English text and Liliane de Veth for compiling the references.
Funding
This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research under Grant (VICI: Communicating Communities, grant number 277-62-001) and (NWO-Open competition: Houses for the Living and the Dead grant number 360-62-030) and the European Research Council (ERC-Synergy NEXUS 1492, grant 319209).
Notes
1 See NEXUS1492.eu.
2 The Spanish Crown permitted slave hunting on these smaller islands by issuing the Real Cédula in 1511 (Pacheco and Cárdenas Citation1864, 304–8).
3 The site of Kelbey’s Ridge was excavated by Menno L. P. Hoogland and Corinne L. Hofman between 1988, 2002 and in 2006. The project was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
4 A house trajectory refers to the material pathways houses form and how they reproduce themselves. It is a spatio-temporal unit made up of a sequence of houses reproduced over time with express reference to the first house. It is not only more durable than its inhabitants but encompasses their concern with social and cultural reproduction through the formal, structured and explicit renewal of house architecture and house practices. Each renewal is a successful reproduction of the house (Samson Citation2010, 42).
5 The site of El Cabo was discovered during the 1970s and subjected to preliminary research by Elpidio Ortega. Extensive excavations of the site and its surroundings were carried out by Leiden University under the direction of Menno L. P. Hoogland and Corinne L. Hofman, in collaboration with the Museo del Hombre Dominicano, between 2005 and 2008. The project entitled Houses for the Living and the Dead was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research with Menno L. P. Hoogland as principal investigator.
6 The site of El Chorro de Maíta was excavated by Guarch Delmonte in the 1980s. The archaeological assemblage has been extensively (re-)studied by Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, in the context of his PhD at Leiden University, between 2005 and 2012.
7 The site of Argyle was excavated under the direction of Corinne L. Hofman and Menno L. P. Hoogland in 2010 in collaboration with the National Trust of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Airport construction company.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Corinne Hofman
Corinne L. Hofman is corresponding principal investigator of NEXUS 1492, ‘New World encounters in a Globalizing World’, a synergy project supported by the European Research Council. She directs the large international and multidisciplinary Caribbean Research Group at Leiden University. Hofman has carried out archaeological research in the Caribbean since the 1980s. Her primary interests are the communication systems and interaction networks of the indigenous populations in the period before and after the European colonization of the Americas in 1492. This interaction is primarily studied on the basis of people’s mobility, intercultural dynamics and the exchange of goods and ideas. She thereby has a great interest in community outreach programmes and the protection of archaeological heritage in the Caribbean.
Angus Mol
Angus A. A. Moll is a post-doc in the Caribbean Research Group at Leiden University. Here he works in the context of the Nexus 1492 project on the theoretical and methodological embedding of network approaches in archaeology, particularly on how they pertain to the study of cultural encounters. Aside from his interests in Caribbean archaeology, his research foci are on exchange systems and the entanglements of social structures and material cultures. In addition he takes an active interest in the epistemology of (archaeological) theories of sociality.
Menno Hoogland
Menno L. P. Hoogland is the director of the Osteoarchaeological Laboratory at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, and a senior researcher in the NEXUS 1492 ERC-synergy project. Since October 2013 he has a part-time position as a full professor of funerary archaeology at the University of Groningen. He has thirty years of experience in archaeological research in the Caribbean with a special interest in indigenous settlement organization, residential structures and mortuary behaviour.
Roberto Valcárcel Rojas
Roberto Valcárcel Rojas is an investigator at the Cuban Ministry of Science’s in Holguín and of the Caribbean Research Group (NEXUS1492 project), Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University. He directs the project ‘Material culture in spaces of Indohispanic interaction (Cuba)’. He is the author of several books and articles about precolonial and colonial archaeology in Cuba. His research interests include ceramics, indigenous social organization, colonial interactions and indigenous survival in the Caribbean.