Convinced that archaeology as a past‑ oriented discipline should exert a transformative impact on the present, we discuss a series of initiatives that aim at interweaving the past of the Los Roques Archipelago, located 135 km off the central coast of Venezuela, into its present‑ day community life. Pioneering archaeological research carried out on these islands since 1982 revealed an unexpectedly rich volume of diversified artifacts and contextual information on the Amerindian seamen who seasonally exploited the local natural resources between A.D. 1200 and 1500. We are confident that despite the historical discontinuity between the pre‑ Hispanic seamen and the current population of the archipelago, the vibrant and colorful archaeological past will reach the present‑ day inhabitants, enriching their socio‑ cultural identity and influencing their way of life that currently oscillates entrapped between fishing and tourism‑ oriented activities. We discuss the aims and methodology of community archeology activities that include talks, exhibits, publications, documentary films and – above all – archaeological workshops that bring together the archaeologists and Los Roques schoolchildren in experiential archaeological events.
In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective middlerange heuristic tool that bridges deep theory and the data available to archaeologists. Our framework foregrounds vibrant things as opposed to static objects, and sympathetically articulates the current concepts of entanglement, correspondence and assemblage. To us an assemblage of practice is a dynamic gathering of corresponding things entangled through situated daily and eventful human practice. Once reassembled by comprehensively and critically marshalling all the evidentiary lines available to archaeologists today, the assemblage of practice becomes a powerful analytical tool that illuminates changes, continuities and transformations in human-thing entanglements, and not only their impacts on local and short-term sociocultural developments, but also their repercussions on phenomena of much larger spatiotemporal scale. Our goal is to present archaeologists with a pluralistic, integrative and evolving middle-range framework that pays close attention to terminological precision and theoretical clarity and is conceptually accessible and widely applicable.
N ew England seafarers fro m small m e rch a n t ships visited th e n atu ral saltpans o f th e Ven ezu elan island o f La Tortuga fro m th e late s even teen th cen tu ry up until 1 78 1. The lim inal space o f th e island set th e stage fo r th e creation o f an im provised 'ta v e rn ' w h e re th e com m unalism o f shipboard life was suddenly changed to m o re m arked ly vertical relations. Draw ing fro m archaeological excavations and original d o cu m e n ta ry sources it is argued th a t, w hile on land, captains no longer w o rk ed alongside th e ir crews w h o n o w labored extracting salt. W ith leisure tim e available to th e m , punch drinking o ffe re d captains a m eans o f discursive practice through th e m a n ip u latio n o f fashionable m aterial c ultu re and an o p p o rtu n ity to negotiate th e ir social position am o ng peers. W h e n given to th e crew , punch served as a labor incentive and a w a y of obfuscating th e sudden change in custom ary cap tain-cre w relations w hile on th e island. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Dedication iii List of Figures iv LIST OF FIGURES 1. Map of the Caribbean 2. La Tortuga Island and the site of Punta Salinas in the southeastern corner 3. Punta Salinas with the saltpans at the top and Los Mogotes Lagoon to the right (photo: Jose Miguel Perez Gomez) 4. Map of the Punta Salinas site (TR/S) 5. English delftware punch bowls from Punta Salinas 6. From left to right, top to bottom: English white salt-glazed, creamware, "scratch blue", New Hampshire black leadglazed red earthenware and Derbyshire/Nottingham brown stoneware punch bowls from Punta Salinas 7. Other artifacts from the Dunes activity area. From left to right, top to bottom: German stoneware mineral water jug, melon-ware teapot from Staffordshire, glass tumbler, Chinese porcelain dish, English delftware plate, English white salt-glazed stoneware plate, lead dice, Spanish silver cob, pewter sundial iv
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