African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean

In the preface to this volume, Editor Jay Haviser notes that “It is an ironic fact that the greatest focus of Caribbean archaeological research until the late twentieth century was toward Amerindian and European colonial studies. Yet clearly, the most dominant cultural influence in the Caribbean is African and African-descent” (p. 1). This statement is also true for other areas of the Americas and for this reason African-American archaeology has become an important specialization within the sub-discipline of historical archaeology. Much of the early archaeology of slavery was concerned with the search for “Africanisms” or marker artifacts that belied the ethnic origins of the enslaved population. However, more recently archaeologists have abandoned the search for definitive index artifacts in favor of creolization theory or the total archaeological pattern associated with the African immigrants and their descendants. Creolization and how it was and is...