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1 The Crab-Shell Dichotomy Revisited The Lithics Speak Out Reniel Rodríguez Ramos In the early 1930s, Froelich Rainey was sponsored to pursue excavations in Puerto Rico as part of the Caribbean Archaeology Program of the Peabody Museum of Yale University. As stated by the program director, Cornelius Osgood (1942:6–7), these excavations were made in an “attempt to improve the methodology of archaeology through intensive research in a particular area, as well as to resolve the Historic problems of the aboriginal populations of the West Indies.” Following these objectives, Rainey conducted ¤eldwork at eight sites in Puerto Rico, along the coast and in the mountainous interior. As a result of this work, Rainey indicated that there was a generalized disruption in the cultural sequence of Puerto Rico; he consistently observed the presence of a layer dominated by crab claws in midden deposits, thus named the Crab culture, overlaid by a cultural stratum that evidenced the intensive exploitation of shells and other marine dietary elements, which he termed the Shell culture. He also noted that the ceramics belonging to the Crab culture were well ¤red, had hard paste, and their surfaces were painted. In contrast, pottery from the Shell culture was unpainted and coarse-tempered. Rainey concluded that these two cultures re®ected two different migrations from South America. Furthermore, even though by that date there had not yet been any formal discovery of a preceramic component in Puerto Rico, he indicated that “The recent excavations have had no bearing on this Ciboney culture except to show that some of the traits by which it is characterized according to Harrington are found in the late, Shell Culture, deposits in Porto Rico” (Rainey 1940:180). The existence of these two cultures, which among other things presented contrasting protein bases, gave rise to the highly discussed crab-shell dichotomy. A couple of years later, Irving Rouse arrived in Puerto Rico to continue the work initiated by Rainey as part of the Scienti¤c Survey of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Rouse’s (1940:49) initial impression of West Indian ceramics, based primarily on his typological analysis of materials from Puerto Rico and Haiti available at the Peabody Museum, was “that pottery-making in the West Indies had a multiple origin, from both North and South America, rather than a single origin from the latter continent.” However, a decade later in his extensive publication of the results of his work on the island he presented a markedly different perspective (Rouse 1952a, 1952b). Based on the latter studies, Rouse concluded that there was a “continuum of ceramic modes” between the Crab and Shell culture pottery, suggesting that there was only one migration of pottery makers to the Antilles. Since then, Rouse’s model has become the most widely used chrono-cultural framework in Caribbean archaeology. In the latest version of his model, Rouse (1992) indicated that there were two migrations to Puerto Rico: the Archaic peoples followed by the Saladoids. The Saladoids were divided into two subseries, the Huecan and the Cedrosan Saladoid; the Archaics as well as the Huecan Saladoid were quickly absorbed or pushed west to the Greater Antilles by the earliest Cedrosans (represented by the Hacienda Grande ceramic style), who then evolved in Puerto Rico into the Ostionoid series; this series presented two major subseries on the eastern and western halves of the island (Elenan and the Ostionan Ostionoid, respectively), which eventually developed into the Chican Ostionoid, the subseries that represents the remains of the Taínos. There seems to be general agreement on two points: that Archaic cultures “contributed little to the subsequent peoples and cultures of the Greater Antilles ” (Rouse and Alegría 1990:80) and that the Cedrosan Saladoid peoples represent the “ancestors of the Tainos” (e.g., Rouse 1992:37, 49). During the last three decades, with the upsurge of processual concerns concomitant with the generalized decrease in emphasis on chronology building, studies dealing with the ceramic age in Puerto Rico such as those on settlement patterns (Curet 1992a, 1992b; Torres 2001), sociopolitical organization (Curet 1992a; López 1975; Siegel 1992), religious development (Curet and Oliver 1998; Rouse 1982; Walker 1993), and dietary shifts (deFrance 1989; Keegan 1989a; Stokes 1998), among others, have commonly presumed the presence of a single cultural series operating on the island at any point in time. Following this argument, it has been proposed that intra-societal dynamics of Cedrosan populations led to increasing social complexity and shifts in material...

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