» Program Description » Research » Course Offerings » Staff » Accomodations » Living in Modern Cuba » Program Costs » Application » Links		RESEARCH Sociopolitical Complexity Spanish-Indian Contact Economic Issues Archival Research The Loma del Convento project is co-sponsored by the Provincial Center of Cultural Patrimony- Cienfuegos and the University of Alabama College of Arts and Sciences. U.S. student participation is administered by Capstone International Programs of the University of Alabama. The joint U.S.-Cuban archaeological project will renew investigations at the site of Loma del Convento. This well-known site, located on a high hill overlooking the lower Arimao River Valley near Cienfuegos, Cuba, possesses nine midden-mounds (residuarios) of different heights surrounding an open plaza. It is one the few sites in Cuba that have yielded evidence of early sixteenth-century Spanish contact. At the time of the conquest of Cuba between 1511 and 1514, Spaniards encountered a group of Native towns along the south-central coast called the province of Guamuhaya. As described in the Spanish accounts, these towns were populated by coastal Arawakan-speaking peoples whose main cultivated crop was bitter manioc, and whose horticultural economy was balanced by intensive marine fishing. In Guamuhaya, the famed cleric Bartolemé de las Casas was rewarded for his service during the conquest with an encomienda, a Native town "commended" to his oversight. Las Casas later renounced this encomienda, which set him on the course of his personal crusade on behalf of the Indians of the Americas. Loma del Convento is the best-preserved of the larger, interior sites in the Arimao River Valley. An exhaustive study of the documentary evidence, place names, and archaeological findings by project archaeologist Marcos Rodríguez Matamoros persuasively identifies Loma del Convento as the site of the Las Casas encomienda. To our knowledge, no other archaeological sites in the Caribbean have been clearly identified with a Spanish encomienda. The site was first tested by its discoverer, Cuban archaeologist Alfredo Rankin, with further testing by Lourdes Dominguez. In 1987 and 1988, a more ambitious joint Cuban-Soviet project explored the largest mound extensively. This was the first work to discover evidence of early Spanish-Indian contact at Loma del Convento, but it has never been reported. Our proposed investigations at Loma del Convento will take up where the joint Cuban-Soviet project left off Cuban-Soviet excavations in the 1980s, and will engage several themes of theoretical interest in the area. Sociopolitical Complexity In recent decades there has been an emphasis on examining the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Caribbean prehistory, particularly in the Greater Antilles, where a cultural climax was reached in the complex Taíno chiefdoms. Based on the preliminary findings of Dominguez, we anticipate that our own results will reveal dimensions of sociopolitical complexity comparable to those found in emergent chiefdom societies elsewhere in the Americas. Thus, for example, if Loma del Convento was a central town in a multi-community polity whose political hierarchy was underwritten by the intensification of root crop agriculture and fisheries, we would expect to identify evidence of internal differentiation in its architectural layout and its artifact assemblages. We would also expect to see evidence of the mobilization of surplus subsistence goods from peripheral sites by chiefly elites, distinguished by sumptuary rules. Comparable suggestions have already been put forth by Dominguez in the form of a highly useful preliminary model, but with the caveat that present data are inadequate to evaluate it. top Spanish-Indian Contact Brass pendant from site The site of Loma del Convento also holds much significance for the archaeological study of Spanish-Indian contact in the Antilles. Cuban sites showing such contact are rare, given the catastrophic decline and almost total Native depopulation of the island by the middle of the sixteenth century, only four decades after the conquest. However, during the joint Cuban-Soviet project of 1987-88, sherds of Spanish majolica, small metal items, and one leg of a brass divider fashioned into a pendant were recovered from the site's largest mound. Loma del Convento presents us with the opportunity to track the fate of a documented encomienda. In the Antilles, encomiendas were personal concessions granted to individual Spaniards. While the inhabitants of Native towns subject to the encomienda system were not technically enslaved, it is understood that in practice, the system was hardly distinguishable from slavery. It seems clear from historical data that in Guamuhaya, a decade after the conquest, "commended" Natives served as laborers on large ranches emphasizing swine-herding and manioc farming, in contrast to mining operations elsewhere on the island. There is local documentary evidence of mass suicide in reaction to the hardships of colonial rule. top Economic Issues The Arawakan expansion into areas already occupied by advanced hunter-gatherers may have led to hybrid systems of food production unlike that seen among the Classic Taíno or elsewhere in the Antilles. One domain in which we expect our contribution to be fundamental is that of the horticultural economy. To date, inferences on this aspect of the regional economy have been based on indirect evidence, that is, on the distribution of manioc griddles (burenes) and Codakia shell scrapers (caguaras), believed to have been used in manioc preparation. To this incomplete picture we will bring recovery techniques suited to the recovery of macro- and microbotanical remains in the tropics, and the expertise to draw from these a much more comprehensive account of food production in the regional economy. top Archival Research Concurrent with the archaeological field and laboratory investigations, new archival investigations will be undertaken both in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, and in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana. Building on previous historical work regarding the early Spanish conquest era in Cuba, including published secondary sources and transcripts of well-known primary sources, the project ethnohistorian will seek additional sources of information regarding the identity of the Loma del Convento site, the encomienda of Las Casas, the broader province of Guamuhaya and its role within the overall Spanish conquest and settlement of Cuba, and the ultimate fate of its native inhabitants during the sixteenth century. This information will be incorporated into a synthetic overview of the Cuban conquest and its impact on the indigenous inhabitants of the Loma del Convento site. top
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