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Cuba and Florida / 21 helped forge one of the earliest and most impressive programs of urban archaeology in the Americas, addressing research, rescue archaeology, and heritage management concerns (Domínguez 1978, 1981, 1984, 2004, 2005; Romero 1981). The subsequent establishment of the Gabinete de Arqueologia and its formal program of urban archaeology in Havana took place in 1987, which was coincidentally the same year that St. Augustine, Florida, adopted an archaeological preservation ordinance and established the first Office of City Archaeologist, held since 1990 by Carl Halbirt. We must also make note of the pioneering work of Gabino La Rosa, beginning in the 1980s, in the archaeological study of cimarronage and slave resistance (La Rosa 1984, 1991, 1995, 2005). La Rosa’s work—deriving from a specifically Caribbean historical and intellectual perspective—has done much to enlarge and redirect the scope of archaeology of the African American experience in North America by his early attention to slave resistance and the creation of maroon communities . African American archaeology in North America before the 1990s had been largely dominated by a historical and social perspective that associated African American history with slavery (see, for example, Fairbanks 1984; Orser 1990; and essays in Singleton 1985). La Rosa’s visits to the United States during the early 1980s brought resistance and nonplantation occupations of colonial-era African Americans to the first serious attention of a number of English-speaking historical archaeologists, including myself. Our excavations at Fort Mose, Florida, for example (the colonial and legally sanctioned free black community near St. Augustine comprised by escaped slaves), began just a year after La Rosa’s visit to the University of Florida in 1985 (Deagan and McMahon 1995). By the late 1990s, U.S. archaeologists studying the African American past in North America had come to regularly incorporate resistance and freedom as foci of research (see essays in Franklin and McKee 2004; Orser 2001; Singleton 1999). The influence of Cuban historical archaeologists on my own work was not restricted to studies of St.Augustine’s free black community. In the early 1980s I was working in Spanish colonial sites of St. Augustine, Florida, and in the sixteenthcentury Spanish townsite of Puerto Real in Haiti. I was well aware of the important work of Lourdes Domínguez on colonial sites in Cuba, both through my mentor Charles Fairbanks, and through colleagues in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. I was therefore delighted to be included in 1983 in a research trip to Cuba intended to develop a convenio between the University of Florida and the Académia de Ciéncias de la Habana. We hoped that the program would allow an exchange between Cuba and Florida of both archaeological and archival information that pertained to our shared colonial-era histories. We arrived in Havana in a privately owned, four-seater Piper Cub piloted by University of Florida historian Michael Gannon and another UF professor, dangerously weighed down with books (Figure 3.2). Archivist Bruce Chappell and I 22 / Deagan spent a few weeks with our incomparable hosts, Lourdes Domíguez and Fé Iglesias, viewing museum collections and archival collections, visiting archaeological sites, and meeting colleagues. On one memorable excursion, we visited Ceiba Mocha, the town (near Santiago) to which many of Florida’s residents emigrated after the English takeover in 1763. There, in a partly ruined eighteenth-century church, our group located the previously undocumented Parish registers for those same immigrant Floridians, begun in 1765 after their arrival in Cuba. The convenio was, in fact, established, and in 1985, Lourdes Domínguez, Fé Iglesias, and Gabino La Rosa came to Florida for a month with a similar research agenda—to visit and document Florida's archaeological collections and pre-Columbian and historic sites. Our joint considerations of the archaeological resources in Cuba and St. Augustine were particularly provocative for us, revealing a shared, Spanish-derived material life in both communities, but at the same time reflecting a markedly more elaborate and diverse expression of that material life in Havana—St. Augustine was indeed a stripped-down backwater. This very pattern of convergence and contrast, however, offered intriguing possibilities for comparative archaeological studies of migration, frontiers, identity formation, and other colonial adjustments. Other important issues that we thought could be usefully explored through archaeological juxtapositions in St. Augustine and Cuba included Figure 3.2. The University of Florida research team arriving at José Martí Airport in Havana, 1983. Left to right: Bruce Chappell, Michael...

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