The book we have just finished is a journey through the Antilles that allows us to appreciate, in detail, what is happening in terms of the archaeological heritage of the region. With this epilogue, I would like to create research bridges and comparisons between the Caribbean region, as expressed in the chapters of this book, and my personal experience doing research in the Colombian Caribbean and other regions of South America. The second chapter is based on an interview with the former Kalinago Chief Irvince Auguiste. Irvince’s voice alerts us to the processes of ethnic revitalization occurring in Dominica. Although Irvince tells us that the self-determination of the Kalinago identity has met with positive acceptance in Dominican society, there is still some work to be done, for example, to diminish the prominence, in the social imaginary, of the idea of the Carib as cruel warriors who feuded with the Arawak over the islands. This case teaches us that, in the geographic basin of the Caribbean, there are processes of identity construction that seek to minimize the impact of colonial histories based on migration studies and catastrophism (Gnecco, 2002). In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, for example, various social movements, especially the Taganga social movement, based in the city of Santa Marta, also seek to make visible local histories that show that their traditions were not eradicated by the conquest, as previously believed (Daniels, 2011). In the struggle against historical biases, not only do Indigenous social movements participate, but there is also a vital critique emerging from the discipline itself. The third chapter showed us how the analysis of school texts in the Dominican Republic proves that national historiographies have had little interest in updating history. In the Colombian case, a critical battlefront has questioned national historiographies and proposals for other histories have been generated through other archaeologies (Gnecco, 2009). This has also occurred in Argentina, where the conjunction of archaeologists and Indigenous movements, especially in northwestern Argentina, has allowed for the questioning of national histories built on ethnic territories (Haber et al., 2010). In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, the Indigenous social movement has been just as forceful as elsewhere and, through its own publications, has questioned archaeological excavations as acts against sacred sites (Mestre & Rawitscher, 2018).
In chapter 6, we saw the efforts made in Jamaica toward what could be a heritage-education process, defined as creating a societal impulse to become aware of the archaeological assets of its territory. This could fit into a community archaeology that encourages citizens to acquire competencies in the value—academic, historical, and cultural—of the archaeological record (Londoño, 2021a). It is evident in South America that community archaeology does not necessarily imply a process of decolonization or a change of paradigm, but the extension of traditional archaeological thinking to the general society. In chapter 7, we saw that, in Haiti, the demands of decolonial archaeology are stronger and push away interest in practicing mere community archaeology because there are, at least, three forms of linkage with colonial traces: these are the use of colonial vestiges for house construction, the consideration of these traces as heritage, and finally the symbolization of these spaces as sites of communication with ancestors. In this framework, appears as a complex questioning of how to link colonial heritage to a narrative that does not exclude the processes of local resistance, while offering a tourist package that does not make the vacation an experience of the horrors of slavery. In Colombia, this problem has been addressed through the construction of the idea of the colony as a melting pot under the famous theory of the culture of the three ethnicities: white, Black, and Indigenous (Villalba et al., 2014). This paradigm involves managing historical resources such as archives and colonial archaeological sites as expressions of a melting pot of identity absent of conflict. At the Universidad del Magdalena, for example, after the creation of the undergraduate degree in History and Heritage Management, a museum was built in which
Moreover, it would not be possible to make these patrimonial stagings without declaring that, in the Caribbean, before Europe, industrial-scale production processes had already begun to exist, which would distort the idea of Europe as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution (Trouillot, 2002). From a decolonial perspective, the Caribbean was not only the cradle of industrial production design, but also the cradle of the praxis of resistance associated with these dynamics of domination. Thus, the proposals we have seen throughout the book interrogate these components of local agencies and their visions of history.
Chapter 9, take us to the Cuban case and how the staging of archaeological industrial heritage has been thought of. This case made it clear to us, with its reference to the work of Rolando Bustos, that heritage processes are based on actions and not on recognitions or observations; the existence of heritage is not confirmed but constructed. We had already been warned above that heritage objects are not ontologically existent, but an epistemological, ergo political, production. In this case, the heritagization of Cuba’s industrial heritage highlights the processes of constructing slave enclaves while proposing a fusion of landscape and museum spaces under the idea of the ecomuseum. This concept is essential since it points out how these initiatives link objects, communities, and territories in the planned tours. Linking history and landscape has also been tested by Indigenous people in Colombia, as in the case of the Misak in the southwest of the country (Urdaneta, 1988). Undoubtedly, this decentralization of the museum from the building system that houses collections has been an essential pillar in the processes of decolonization of the museum.
We saw in chapter 10 how “the past may be a prologue” in Barbados. This demonstrates how, on a global scale, cultural and archaeological heritage are inputs that seek to empower local voices through the search for their roots, while heritage becomes something that motivates tours and visits: routes (Clifford, 1997). Undoubtedly, the educational possibilities of cultural and archaeological heritage are adjacent to its potential for political empowerment; the people
On a global scale, cultural and archaeological heritage are part of the theater of the symbolic dispute over the past. In the domain of heritage commodification, there has been an effort emanating from state cultural institutions to convert heritage into a commodity of enjoyment (Talalay, 2004); in the domain of social movements, there has been an imperative to reverse the vestiges of the past into evidence of a preexistence of the state that implies a differential political treatment (Londoño, 2021a). However, this political potential of heritage is not at odds with the establishment of ecosystems for managing cultural and archaeological heritage. Chapter 11, showed us the interinstitutional management that allows for the social management of heritage. The case of the Dutch Caribbean also shows us the importance of managing submerged heritage resources, which is another sphere of analysis of heritage issues. In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, Los Taganga shows that coastal communities demand management of the sea and submerged resources, including archaeological sites. The case of the wreck known as the San José Galleon has shown that wrecks such as this one should be analyzed and understood together with the Indigenous Peoples who created the wealth on that ship (Buitrago et al., 2021). As we saw in chapter 12, the concern for submerged cultural heritage is related to the individual agency of the subjects who end up, almost accidentally, being custodians of these heritages. In a certain sense, this local capacity to participate in the management of submerged archaeological heritage, as shown in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, reveals a state weakness in the management of archaeological research that should be configured into constant efforts to inject funds and generate legislation in favor of archaeological heritage.
In the case of South America, including the Colombian Caribbean, state weakness in the financing of archaeological research is concomitant with the existence of detailed legislation regulating preventive archaeology programs, in such a way that archaeological research has almost been abandoned to turn the profession into a site release technique (Londoño, 2016; Gnecco, 2018). Amid this correlation of forces, as systems of recognition of cultural differences appear, disciplines such as archaeology become instruments of the market, losing their critical potential.
In addition to these problems, the future demands research into regional history to better understand the Caribbean—i.e., not from the classical perspectives that divide it into two poles, one insular and the other continental,
In conclusion, the Caribbean should be looked at from other perspectives, ones that do not involve colonial prejudices, such as understanding migrations as a motivating factor for archaeological research. Likewise, the Caribbean must be viewed in its totality as a space of multiple interactions with diverse intensities. Finally, the Caribbean must be understood as a decolonial space par excellence since, in the constitution of its society, the submission of Amerindian communities and the establishment of slavery generated a culture of resistance that is undoubtedly a modern political expression. Without addressing these new fronts of work that the book opens up, we can do little to generate the epistemological and political revolutions we need in these uncertain times. In any case, we must remember Truoillot’s statement that the Caribbean is an open frontier for anthropological theory (Trouillot, 1992).
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