Papers In Caribbean Anthropology

The first single-authored comprehensive introduction to major contemporary research trends, issues, and debates on the anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean. The text provides wide and historically informed coverage of key facets of Latin American and Caribbean societies and their cultural and historical development as well as the roles of power and inequality. Cymeme Howe, Visiting Assistant Professor of Cornell University writes, “The text moves well and builds over time, paying close attention to balancing both the Caribbean and Latin America as geographic regions, Spanish and non-Spanish speaking countries, and historical and contemporary issues in the field. I found the geographic breadth to be especially impressive.” Jeffrey W. Mantz of California State University, Stanislaus, notes that the contents “reflect the insights of an anthropologist who knows Latin America intimately and extensively.”

The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology provides an overview of archaeological investigations in the insular Caribbean, understood here as the islands whose shores surround the Caribbean Sea and the islands of the Bahama Archipelago. Though these islands were never isolated from the surrounding mainland, their histories are sufficiently diverse to warrant their identification as distinct areas of culture. Over the past 20 years, Caribbean archaeology has been transformed from a focus on reconstructing culture histories to one on the mobility and exchange expressed in cultural and social dynamics. This Handbook brings together, for the first time, examples of the best research conducted by scholars from across the globe to address the complexity of the Caribbean past. The Handbook is divided into five sections. Part I, Islands of History and the Precolonial History of the Caribbean Islands, provides an introduction to Caribbean Archaeology and its history. The papers in the following Ethnohistory section address the diversity of cultural practices expressed in the insular Caribbean and develop historical descriptions in concert with archaeological evidence in order to place language, social organization, and the native Ta?nos and Island Caribs in perspective. The following section, Culture History, provides the latest research on specific geographical locations and cross-cultural engagements, from Jamaica and the Bahama archigelago to the Saladoid and the Isthmo-Antillean Engagements. Creating History, the fourth section, includes papers on specific issues related to the field, such as Zooarchaeology, Rock Art, and DNA analysis, among others. The final section, World History, centers on the consequences of European colonization.