En Bas Saline: A Taíno Town before and after Columbus - Hardcover

by Kathleen Deagan (Author)

Life in an Indigenous town during an understudied era of Haitian history

This book details the Indigenous Taíno occupation at En Bas Saline in Hispaniola between AD 1250 and 1520, showing how the community coped with the dramatic changes imposed by Spanish contact. En Bas Saline is the largest late precontact Taíno town recorded in what is now Haiti; the only one that has been extensively excavated and analyzed; and one of few with archaeologically documented occupation both before and after the arrival of Columbus in 1492. It is thought to be the site of La Navidad, Columbus's first settlement, where the cacique Guacanagarí offered refuge and shelter after the sinking of the Santa María.

Kathleen Deagan provides an intrasite and spatial analysis of En Bas Saline by focusing on households, foodways, ceramics, and crafts and offers insights into social organization and chiefly power in this political center through domestic and ornamental material culture. Postcontact changes are seen in patterns of gendered behavior, as well as in the power base of the caciques, challenging the traditional assumption that Taíno society was devastatingly disrupted almost immediately after contact. En Bas Saline is the only archaeological account of the consequences of contact from the perspective of the Taíno peoples' lived experience.

Author Biography

Kathleen Deagan is Distinguished Research Curator of Archaeology Emerita and the Emerita Lockwood Professor of Florida and Caribbean Archaeology at the University of Florida. Her many books include Puerto Real: The Archaeology of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Town in Hispaniola. Deagan is the recipient of many awards, including the J. C. Harrington Award for lifetime distinction from the Society for Historical Archaeology.