Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

Acknowledgments

Both the spirit and the reality of this project correspond to a collaborative team project. Many individuals and organizations have lent their support and enthusiasm to its inception, realization, and transformation from a conference symposium to an edited volume. The symposium and related forum out of which this volume grew took place at the 2002 Society for American Archaeology 67th Annual Meeting held in Denver, Colorado. The travel and participation of the Cuban presenters was made possible by a generous grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council’s Working Group on Cuba. The sources of the funds made available were the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Christopher Reynolds Foundation. Staff member Rachel Price of the ACLS/ SSRC was encouraging and helpful at every point along the way. Cuban organizations such as the Centro de Antropología de Cuba and the Gabinete de Arqueología de la Habana also lent their logistical and ¤nancial support toward preparing travel arrangements for the Cuban participants. The leadership and staff of the Society for American Archaeology were extremely supportive of the endeavor, offering of¤cial sponsorship of the symposium, extending hospitality to the participants, and helping to accommodate the needs of a bilingual session. SAA President Bob Kelly was particularly gracious and enthusiastic, opening the session with introductory comments in Spanish. The dif¤cult task of real-time translation fell to Gustavo Gamez. Others participated in the round-table forum following the symposium which established a consensus and sense of urgency in support of this Acknowledgments publication. Daniel Sandweiss of the University of Maine and Sean Britt of Earthwatch Institute made substantial contributions to the discussion. Shannon Lee Dawdy, who organized the conference events, received logistical support from the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and travel funds from the Rackham School of Graduate Students during 2001 –2002. Her own trip to Cuba in 1 999 that led to her friendship with Gabino La Rosa and the idea for the symposium was supported by a Latin American and Caribbean Studies pre-dissertation award from the University of Michigan’s International Institute. She would not have gone to Cuba had it not been for the buoyant advising of Rebecca Scott. In Cuba, Marcos Rodríguez Matamoros and Lester Puntonet Toledo shared their knowledge of Cuban archaeology and helped set a path for this project in ways of which they are probably unaware and for which she is deeply grateful. Shannon would also like to thank her brother, Jess Dawdy, who provided childcare in Denver under some dif¤cult, if humorous, conditions. The editors are grateful that all of the original symposium presenters (Mary Jane Berman, Ramón Dacal Moure, Lourdes Domínguez, Jorge Febles, Perry L. Gnivecki, Pedro Godo, Gabino La Rosa Corzo, Theresa Singleton, and David Watters) agreed to submit their contributions for publication. It was clear in the early stages of the preparation of this volume that additional authors were needed in order to include a wider representation of Cuban archaeology , and the decision was made then to invite several other colleagues to contribute to this publication. The editors would like to thank these additional contributors—Marlene Linville, César Rodríguez Arce, Jorge Ulloa Hung, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, and Samuel M. Wilson—for graciously accepting our invitation to participate in this publication. More than anything we deeply appreciate the patience, understanding, and support of all these distinguished authors during the whole process in the preparation of this volume. The editors also express their gratitude to Judith Knight, acquisition editor at The University of Alabama Press, for her support of this project from the beginning and for her patience. José Oliver, Kathleen Deagan, and an anonymous reviewer provided valuable and important comments that strengthened the quality of the volume. We would also like to thank Tisha Smith and Louise Elinoff for their assistance in preparing the list of references cited and Daniel McNaughton for ¤nal proofreading. Jill Seagard, Scienti¤c Illustrator of the Department of Anthropology of the Field Museum of Natural History, deserves credit for the ¤nal versions of Figures 1 .1 and 4.1 . xvi / Acknowledgments DIALOGUES IN CUBAN ARCHAEOLOGY ...