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16 Epilogue The Correct Answer Requires the Right Question (and the Technology to Back It Up) William F. Keegan Let me start with an anecdote. When I first started working in Caribbean archaeology in 1978, I happened to be associated with several biologists who were studying Queen Conch (Strombus gigas). I was in the Caicos Islands and at the time they were still shipping millions of dried conch per year to Haiti (until the conch population crashed a few years later). It already had been pointed out that “Indian opened” or punched conch had a small round hole in the spire, which contrasted markedly with the linear cut made by modern fisherman. At one of the first meetings of Caribbean archaeologists that I attended I asked if anyone knew how the native peoples had removed the animal from the shell using this small round hole. There were a number of incorrect answers, but the bottom line was that no one had really thought about it. No one asked the question. The same attitude prevailed with regard to the production of conch tools. Only shell artifacts with a ground work-edge were then considered tools. Thank god for Ramón Dacal Moure (1978) and Doug Armstrong (1979) who first raised the question of whether recurrent and unmodified shell forms were “scrap” or tools. At the time it was assumed that the rough form of these tools could be achieved by smashing the shell on a rock. I can assure you that this is not an easy procedure , and that it does not yield useable tools. A few years later, at my next meeting, I demonstrated how these expedient forms had to have been purposely manufactured (Keegan 1981, 1984). To my chagrin, in the process of making a tool I slit my wrist on the sharp edge of a Strombus lip, and Strombus tool replication quickly was christened “Arawak suicide.” I still have the scar to prove it! Preamble There seems to be a general impression that Caribbean archaeologists have lagged behind their colleagues in the application of methods and theories. This is espe- Epilogue / 227 cially apparent when new investigators enter the region and fail to acknowledge the vast amount of work that has preceded them (e.g., Fitzpatrick 2004). For them, everything is a “new” perspective. Nothing could be further from the truth. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that Caribbean research is still on the cutting edge; it has always been so and we should expect no less. In their History of American Archaeology, Willey and Sabloff (1974) identified Irving Rouse as the foundation, the base of the tree, for modern archaeology for his contributions to the classificatory-historical period. In addition, Rouse’s (1939) model, although Ben never liked the word model, of the cultural and behavioral patterning of artifacts is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago. Elizabeth Wing was a pioneer in the field of environmental archaeology (Wing and Reitz 1982), and many of her early studies involved faunal remains from the West Indies. Lee Newsom (1993) and Deborah Pearsall (2000), using Caribbean data, are pioneers in the field of archaeobotany. David Watters (1982) was one of the early practitioners of the subfield now called island archaeology. Marxist approaches were used to interpret developments in the Caribbean long before these became popular in the United States and Europe (Curet et al. 2005; Veloz Maggiolo et al. 1981). Kathleen Deagan (2004) and Lourdes Domínguez (2005) were instrumental in the development of historical archaeology, and became so based on research in the Caribbean. In Deagan’s study of En Bas Saline, Haiti, she was one of the first to use electromagnetic conductivity as a remote sensing device (Williams 1986); Mary Collins used ground penetrating radar at the Coralie site on Grand Turk in the days when the readout was generated by carbon scoring (Hardman et al. 1998); and a Caribbeanist wrote the section on remote sensing for the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (Keegan 1996b). Schoeninger and associates (1993) made the first study of stable carbon isotopes for coastal human populations, which included samples from the Bahamas; the very first study of nitrogen isotopes in an aquatic setting came from samples collected in the Caribbean (Keegan and DeNiro 1988); and Anne Stokes (1998) made one of the earliest studies of whole diet using stable isotopes extracted from bone apatite. In the late 1970s, Shaun Sullivan (1981) did a metallurgical analysis of a brass nose ornament from...

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