#Garifunahistory #Garifunascholarship #knowthyself #Garifuna The Carib Problem There is in the later archeology of the Lesser Antilles an unsolved question which can be termed the Carib problem and which has interfered with much of our understanding of the late cultural developments in these islands. Simply formulated, the Carib problem consist of whether or not the latest prehistoric remains in the islands can be correlated with the historic population, the Island Caribs, which refer to a recent migration out of the Guiana coast to the islands, in reconstructing their prehistory; this implies that such a migration can be traced to the archeological evidence, and that some of the component of the latest ceramic complexes can be date to the historic period. The view is currently held by many archeologists, and statements such as the Caribs migrated in A.D. 1000 or good examples of Island Carib archeology, dated ca. A.D 1350, are common in the existing literature. The question is not limited to which name is more appropriate for the late prehistoric complexes. It involves how accurate can out knowledge of the late prehistory of the island be, and to what extent specific analogy with the historic inhabitants, fully documented in the seventeenth century, can be used in out understanding of the past. The solution to the problem, in fact, moreover involves our knowledge of the past population movements out of the tropical forest area, and cultural developments not only at the even of the contacts, but from the very end of the last Saladoid complexes on the islands, ca. A.D. 600; in other words, more than one thousand years of prehistory, until coming of the Europeans, remain controversial. source: Louis Allaire (1977) Later History in Martinique and the Island Caribs: Problems in Ethnic Indentification
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 23:39:42 +0000