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Kathleen Deagan

José María Cruxent is acknowledged as the father of modern archaeology in Venezuela and as a pioneer in the historical archaeology of Latin America and the Caribbean. He is also recognized as an artist of interna-tional standing. Born in Barcelona, he studied archae-ology and history at the University of Barcelona under Pere Bosch Gimpera. His studies were interrupted by the Spanish Civil War (1936–38), in which Cruxent served as a medic and cameraman with Republican forces fighting Franco. In 1939, he fled Spain and arrived in Venezu-ela with only the clothes he was wearing and ten dol-lars in his pocket. He did various jobs, including movie projectionist and fruit vendor, and eventually became a primary school art instructor. During his free time, he carried out archaeological surveys of the countryside (going by bus) and brought the resulting collections to the National Museum of Science in Caracas, where he became friends with Walter Dupouy and Antonio Re-quena. At that time, there were no formal academic or governmental programs of archaeology in Venezuela.

In 1944, Cruxent joined the staff of the museum, and by 1948, his passion for fieldwork and collections earned him the position of director of the National Museum of Science, a post he held until 1960. During his time as director of the museum, he established the first Depart-ment of Archaeology and relentlessly continued his pro-grams of fieldwork. His propro-grams included Paleo-Indian studies, working at El Jobo and Taima-Taima (some of the most influential sites for understanding the entry of people into the Americas) and at Nueva Cadiz on Cu-bagua, the first European settlement in South America and one of the first historical archaeology projects un-dertaken in the Caribbean. Cruxent also established close professional connections worldwide, bringing the museum (and Venezuelan archaeology) into the global arena.

One of his most fruitful collaborations was with Pro-fessor Irving Rouse of Yale University, with whom he collaborated on the pioneering monograph An Archae-ological Chronology of Venezuela (1958, Pan American Union Monograph No. 6), later published as Venezuelan Archaeology (1963, Yale University Press). Another fruit-ful collaboration was with University of Florida archae-ologist John Goggin, with whom he worked at the site of Nueva Cadiz, Isla Cubagua, in 1954. That program, as well as Cruxent’s work during the 1950s in the early colonial sites of Panamá, was critical to the development of the classificatory system for Spanish colonial ceramics that is still used today by archaeologists in the Caribbean and beyond. Cruxent also engaged in collaborations with archaeological colleagues in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico and served as the president of the Roundtable Reunion of Caribbean Anthropologists held in Havana in 1950. The group established the Ca-ribbean Anthropological Federation, a forerunner of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology.

As director of the Museum of Science, Cruxent orga-nized and participated in a number of exploratory ex-peditions into the unknown parts of the Amazon and Panamá, including the renowned Franco-Venezolano expedition of 1951 to find the source of the Orinoco. The successful seven-month expedition into the jungle fasci-nated and excited the press and the public, and Cruxent became a celebrity in Venezuela, where he offered fre-quent public lectures and media interviews. His celebrity was undoubtedly enhanced by his originality, simplicity, and lifelong lack of pretension. He preferred to appear with his pipe and wearing sandals, and he appeared only rarely wearing a tie.

Cruxent was one of the founders of the School of So-ciology and Anthropology of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, created in 1952 through a formal

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ment and professional exchange with the University of Wisconsin. His role as a teacher influenced archaeol-ogy in the circum-Caribbean region; he trained such archaeologists as Erika Wagner, Alberta Zucchi, Emiro Durán, and Eddie Romero. He further enhanced the professional standing of and training opportunities for archaeology in Venezuela in 1960 as the founder of the Department of Anthropology at the prestigious Insti-tuto Venezolano de Investigaciones Ceintificas (IVIC;

The Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigation), which had been founded the previous year by Marcel Roche. In 1963, Cruxent established the first radiocar-bon dating laboratory in Latin America (supervised by Murray Tamers) at the IVIC. Cruxent remained at the IVIC, where he carried out his programs of teaching, fieldwork, and laboratory research, until 1976.

At the age of 65, Cruxent shifted his focus to Coro, in Falcón State in Venezuela, where he continued to pursue his two principal archaeological interests: the entry of humans into the Americas and the period of Spanish-American encounter. One of the earliest Spanish-American pro-ponents of the theory that people arrived in the Ameri-cas more than 10,000 years ago, Cruxent established the presence of lithic complexes dating to circa 14,000 BP at the site of Taima-Taima near Coro well before the con-temporary research that corroborated his work. In 1987, he undertook the excavation of La Isabela in the Domin-ican Republic, the first European town in America. That

project developed into an international collaboration among the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, the United States, Spain, and Italy, which Cruxent coordinated until 1996.

Throughout his archaeological career, Cruxent re-mained committed to his art. His mixed-media, textural works are featured not only in Venezuela but also in gal-leries and museums throughout Europe. His art, like his archaeology, is forward-looking, provocative, iconoclas-tic, and always impassioned. José Maria Cruxent died at the age of 94 in Coro, Venezuela.

Further Reading

Cabrero, F. 2009. José María Cruxent: El espíritu de la materia.

Caracas: Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientí-ficas.

Cárdenas, M. L., and A. de Azcárate Wilson. 1992. Homenaje a Cruxent: Siglo XXI: El hombre, cultura y desafíos. Coro, Venezuela: Museo de Arte de Coro.

Wagner, E. 2006. “José María Cruxent: Padre de la arque-ología moderna de Venezuela (1911–2005).” Antropologica 101 (2004): 9–12.

Wagner, E., and A. Zucchi, eds. 1978. Undidad y variedad: En-sayos en homenaje a José M. Cruxent. Caracas: Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas.

See also The International Association for Caribbean Ar-chaeology (IACA); Rouse, Benjamin Irving (1913–2006).

Cuba (Historical Archaeology of)

Theresa Singleton

Historical Background

Historical archaeology (a term used only recently in Cuba) designates the archaeological study of the period beginning with Spanish settlement of the island. It was initially referred to as colonial archaeology, and this term is still preferred by some practitioners today. The colonial period (1511–1898) continues to be the primary emphasis of this research, but Cuban historical archaeol-ogy has become more than the study of a time period; it is the study of the social processes involved in the mak-ing of Cuban society. Historical archaeology began tak-ing shape in Cuba in the 1930s, and by the late 1960s

it had become an integral part of Cuban archaeological research and practice.

Christopher Columbus landed on Cuba on Oc-tober 28, 1492, and reputedly described the pristine landscape where he landed as “the most beautiful land the human eye has beheld.” The colonization of Cuba began in 1511 under the command of Diego Velázquez y Cuellar, who wasted no time in subjugating the ab-original population through violence and brute force.

By 1515, the Spanish had founded seven settlements on the island, all of which are major cities today: Baracoa

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(1511), Bayamo (1513), Sancti Spíritus (1514), Trinidad (1514), Havana (1515), Puerto Principe (1515; known as Camagüey today), and Santiago de Cuba (1515). The Spanish most likely established towns in these loca-tions because of their close proximity to communi-ties of aboriginals, who initially provided labor for the colonists. In each town, the central plaza, which fea-tured a church, a town hall, and a garrison, was built first. Town dwellers received plots on which to build their houses and shared other plots used in common as forests, pastures, and watering places. Local represen-tatives of the Spanish Crown, vecinos, distributed the remaining lands in the colony into smaller land por-tions known as encomiendas, based on the beneficiary’s influence and position in the social hierarchy. Settlers were granted land in usufruct—they could profit from using the property, but the Spanish Crown retained all land ownership. Enslaved Amerindians, both native to Cuba and from nearby islands, supplied the work force for the encomiendas. Brutal treatment of Indian labor-ers drastically reduced their numblabor-ers, and in 1542, the encomienda system was abolished. By that time, many of the first Spanish immigrants to Cuba had left in search of gold in Mexico and Peru. For the next 200 years, Cuba developed into a sparsely populated colony of cattle and pig ranches and small-scale farms, some of which produced sugar and tobacco—staple crops that would later bring prosperity to the island. Enslaved Af-ricans replaced enslaved Amerindians as the primary work force for many of these enterprises. Havana and Santiago flourished as port cities, servicing ships pass-ing to and from mainland Spanish America.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown set in motion a series of reforms directed toward making Cuba a wealthy colony. Con-sequently, Cuba underwent major economic and so-cial transformations that resulted in its emergence as the foremost nineteenth-century Caribbean plantation economy. These reforms permitted the breaking up of royal land grants into parcels for private land owner-ship, opened Cuba to free trade, and accelerated the importation of enslaved Africans. Immigrants, partic-ularly French planters fleeing the Haitian Revolution, joined Cuban planters in the expansion of coffee and sugar production. By the 1830s, Cuba had become the world’s leading producer of sugar; coffee and tobacco were important secondary crops. The explosion of Cuba’s plantation economy boosted trade at port cities, and by 1850, Havana was among the ten busiest ports in the world. However, increased prosperity nurtured a

growing desire for independence from Spain as Cuban taxpayers found themselves increasingly contributing to an empire that Spain was having difficulty financing.

The Cuban struggle for independence lasted for thirty years (1868–1898), during which two wars took place.

Finally, in 1898, after the United States intervened, Spain was forced to withdraw from Cuba.

Archaeological Research

Archaeologists have investigated diverse aspects of the 400-year Spanish colonial period in Cuba. Early stud-ies of contact period sites, plantations, and significant historical buildings appeared in the journal Revista de la Junta Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in the 1940s and 1950s. El Yayal in Hoguín province is an example of a contact period site that was originally thought to be near the location where Columbus first landed in Cuba. This area of interest was initially investigated in the 1930s and was restudied by Lourdes Domínguez in 1970 and 1981. She posited that the site was an aborigi-nal settlement with a large quantity of Spanish trade goods that was occupied during the first half of the sixteenth century. Whether or not Yayal was part of an encomienda is unclear, but it provides a glimpse of Cu-ban aboriginal life during the earliest period of Spanish colonization.

Plantation studies also contributed to the forma-tion and development of Cuban historical archaeology.

In 1930, Fernando Boytel Jambú began his study of La Isabelica, a French-owned coffee plantation outside Santiago, and in the early days of revolutionary Cuba (post-1959), archaeology was used to restore the site and develop it into a plantation museum that is still in op-eration today. Since that time, several plantations have been investigated on Cuba, including San Isidro de los Destiladeros (Figure C.17) and other sugar plantations in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Valley of Sugar Plantations near Trinidad in central Cuba on the south coast; coffee plantations in Sierra del Rosario in the Piñar del Rio; and coffee and sugar plantations in Havana and Matanzas provinces, including Taoro, La Manuela, Santa Ana de Biajacas, and La Dionesia. Plan-tation studies have primarily addressed questions about the spatial layout and built environment of slavery and (only recently) living conditions of the enslaved and the relationships between masters and enslaved peoples.

Complementing the study of plantations, investiga-tions of sites where enslaved runaways settled have been undertaken in both eastern and western Cuba. These

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sites are of two types: 1) palenques—substantial long-term settlements with evidence of horticulture; and 2) sites of cimarrones, small groups of runaways who were frequently on the move and lived in caves and overhangs, foraged for wild food, and raided nearby plantations for food and supplies. Gabino La Rosa has investigated both types of sites for over twenty-five years: palenques in the Sierra Maestra in eastern Cuba and cimarrones in the Si-erra del Grillo in Havana province. At the palenque sites, La Rosa observed clusters of dwellings laid out to form inner squares and inner paths leading from one cluster of dwellings to another. These inner pathways may have facilitated communication and movement throughout the settlement without the knowledge of outsiders such as the slave hunters who were in constant pursuit of run-aways.

The most ambitious project in historical archae-ology has been the long-term study of Habana Vieja (old Havana), which has been continuously occupied since the relocation of the first site of Havana from the south coast to its present location on the north coast in 1519. Most of Old Havana was once enclosed within

city walls measuring 1.4 meters (5 feet) thick, 10 me-ters (33 feet) high, and almost 5 kilomeme-ters long (3.1 miles) with nine gates. Building the walls took close to 100 years to complete, and in the nineteenth cen-tury the walls were almost completely demolished, ex-cept for a few remnants that are still standing today (Figure C.18). Systematic study of archaeological sites in Old Havana began in 1968, and in that same year historical archaeology became an established special-ization throughout the country. Initial projects were baseline studies undertaken to salvage archaeological data from sites undergoing architectural restoration.

These studies provided valuable information on the nature and stratigraphy of archaeological deposits in Old Havana and information that was used to identify and date artifacts. Since 1987, the Gabinete de Arque-ología—a unit of the Office of the Historian for the City of Havana—has continued salvage archaeology within a research program designed to examine changing pat-terns of urban settlement, consumption, lifeways, and cultural interaction from the sixteenth to the twenti-eth centuries, among other topics. The work is done by multidisciplinary teams of archaeologists, historians, art historians, and architectural historians. Beginning in 2001, article-length studies from this research have been published in an annual journal, Gabinete de Ar-queología. The journal quickly became the major pub-lication of Cuban historical archaeology. The program in urban archaeology in Old Havana is unique and is the most comprehensive of its kind in the Caribbean and perhaps in all of Latin America. All historical ar-chaeologists can learn from this extraordinary research program.

Conclusion

Cuban historical archaeology is a scholarly tradition of at least seventy to eighty years that continues to expand, despite the significant economic setbacks the country has endured over the past two decades. Most investi-gations are concentrated around Havana and Trini-dad, two UNESCO World Heritage sites with strong heritage preservation programs, but other regions and provinces are also beginning more projects in historical archaeology. Publication based on this research is in-creasing, and the Web site www.cubaarqueologica.org provides up-to-date reports of ongoing projects. Col-laborations between Cuban and expatriate archaeolo-gists in long-term projects has further enhanced Cu-ban historical archaeology through cross-fertilization

Figure C.17. Bell Tower at San Isidro de los Destiladeros, a for-mer sugar plantation near Trinidad, Cuba. Photo by Theresa Singleton.

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of research ideas, approaches, and interpretations. This has resulted in greater visibility of Cuban research in archaeological venues outside Cuba. Once considered the pearl of the Spanish empire, Cuba is well on its way to becoming the jewel of the Caribbean in the area of historical archaeology.

Further Reading

Curet, L. A., L. D. Shannon, and G. La Rosa Corzo, eds. 2005.

Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Domínguez, L. 1995. Arqueología colonial cubana: Dos estudios.

Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Hernández de Lara, Odlanyer. 2010. De Esclavos y Inmigrantes:

Arqueología Histórica en una Plantación Cafetalera Cubana.

Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Pre-Columbinas, Instituto Superior del Profesorado Dr. Joaquín V. González.

La Rosa Corzo, G. 2003. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba:

Resistance and Repression. Trans. Mary Todd. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press.

Singleton, T. A., and Marcos André de Souza Torres. 2009. “Ar-chaeologies of the African Diaspora: Brazil, Cuba, United States.” In International Handbook for Historical Archaeol-ogy, ed. T. Majewski and D. Gaimster, 449–69. New York:

Springer.

See also Betty’s Hope Plantation (Antigua); Historical Ar-chaeological Sites (Types); La Reconnaissance Site (Trini-dad); Magens House Compound, Kongens Quarters (Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas); The Seville Sugar Planta-tion (British Colonial Jamaica); Spanish Town (Jamaica).

Figure C.18. Portion of the wall that once enclosed Old Havana. Photo by Theresa Singleton.

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