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1 Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries and National Borders New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean Corinne L. Hofman, Menno L. P. Hoogland, and Annelou L. van Gijn Introduction During the past decades, Caribbean scholars have increasingly employed and developed new methods and techniques for the study of archaeological materials. While the aim of earlier research in the Caribbean was mainly to define typologies on the basis of pottery and lithic assemblages leading to the establishment of chronological charts for the region, it was not until the 1980s that the use of technological and functional analyses of artifacts gained interest. The 1990s saw a veritable boom in this field, introducing innovative methods and techniques for analyzing artifacts and human skeletal remains. Innovative approaches that were introduced included microscopic use-wear analysis, starch residue and phytolith analysis, stable isotope analysis, experimental research, ethnoarchaeological studies , geochemical analyses, and aDNA studies. Such studies benefited from a diverse array of experience related to the international background of the researchers constituting the archaeological community of the Caribbean. Most of these methods and techniques have long proven to be very successful in the study of archaeological materials elsewhere in the world, but in the Caribbean were less common and had not been applied systematically. The application of these approaches has shown their intrinsic value for the interpretation of the archaeological data of recently excavated sites throughout the Caribbean region and have provided new insights into the interpretation of the precolonial societies of the Caribbean, specifically regarding artifact manufacturing processes, technological systems, resource exploitation, diet, mobility, exchange, social organization, continuity, and cultural change. The present volume forms an outcome of the symposium titled “New Methods 2 / Hofman, Hoogland, and van Gijn and Techniques in the Study of Material Culture in the Caribbean,”held at the 71st Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Puerto Rico in April 2006. The symposium was organized by Corinne Hofman and Annelou van Gijn, both of the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University, as a product of collaborative research between its Caribbean Research Group and the Laboratory of Artifacts initiated 15 years ago. The purpose of this volume is to bring together new methods and techniques in the study of archaeological materials from the Caribbean and to assess possible avenues of mutual benefit and integration. The introduction of innovative approaches has generated new research questions for the archaeology of the Caribbean in general over the past years. The current volume comprehensively explores the advantages and disadvantages in the application of a selected number of newly emerging methods and techniques. Each of these approaches is illustrated by a case study. A background to the study of archaeological materials in the Caribbean since the 1930s is provided in order to contextualize the latest developments in this field. Background to the Study of Archaeological Materials in the Caribbean The Initiators: 1930s–1980s Typo-chronological studies have been the driving force in Caribbean archaeology since the early 1930s. Such studies were used to describe the cultural development in the Caribbean on the basis of pottery, because pottery represents a very important part of the material culture of Amerindian communities, besides artifacts made of shell, coral, and stone, and perishable materials such as wood, calabash , fibers, cotton, and feathers. The actual ratio of perishable vs. nonperishable materials in the original artifact assemblages of the Amerindian communities in the Caribbean is unknown, although it is most likely that perishable materials accounted for more than half of the material culture assemblage. In order to establish a typo-chronological framework for the Caribbean, Irving Rouse (1972) employed the multivariate“modal”approach and advocated the classification of pottery styles as the basis for delimiting a material culture and the people behind that culture. In his view, recurrent artifact assemblages or“cultures” can be ascribed to one people and the cultural development of that people can be described on the basis of the development of style. Rouse, who followed the Midwestern Taxonomic System developed by McKern (Lyman and O’Brien 2002), defined a pottery style or complex as the entire pottery repertoire of a people during one single cultural period. This hierarchical scheme was conceived of as analogous to the biological classification system created by the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus. New Methods and Techniques / 3 Rouse emphasized each pottery style as defined by a unique set of material, shape, and/or decorative attributes, which may also be used to identify the area and period, and...

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