The European side of this story is well known. Christopher Columbus arrives in the Caribbean in 1492, and on Christmas Eve, his flagship, the Santa María, runs aground on a sand bar near Hispaniola. With the aid of Cacique Guacanagarí, supplies are unloaded, and the Taíno leader grants the interlopers refuge in his principal town. There, Columbus establishes the inaugural Spanish community of La Navidad. A year later, the settlement was found burned and abandoned, and the 40 or so men who had been left behind to oversee it were all dead. Many Spaniards blamed the vanished cacique himself for its destruction, whereas others, including Columbus, considered Guacanagarí a faithful ally. But what about the Indigenous towns located near this historic encounter? In her book En Bas Saline: A Taíno Town before and after Columbus, Kathleen Deagan synthesizes the findings of excavations at En Bas Saline and builds a compelling case for identifying the site as the town of Guacanagarí.
As a Florida archaeologist interested in sixteenth-century Indigenous–Spanish entanglements—and a former student of the author—I was eager to read this book. The volume contains a preface, 15 chapters, and supplemental appendixes available online. An introduction (Chapter 1) and retrospect (Chapter 15) bookend chapters covering historical background (Chapter 2); concepts and theories relating to chiefly polities, including those of the Caribbean (Chapters 3–5); research design and field procedures (Chapters 6–9); site materiality and features (Chapters 10–12); and “postcontact” circumstances (Chapter 13–14).
Located in present-day Haiti, the archaeological site of En Bas Saline became the focus of survey and excavations led by Deagan between 1983 and 1988, and again in 2003. The initial impetus for excavating the site was to search for traces of La Navidad, but the book purposefully spotlights the site's Indigenous precolumbian and post-1492 community. Although differing facets of site data have been presented elsewhere over the past 40 years, Deagan deftly synthesizes a wealth of information from an up-to-date perspective in Caribbean archaeology.
Before delving into excavation results, Deagan concisely outlines her theoretical framework and situates En Bas Saline within a broader context of regional migrations, pottery-making traditions, and chiefly polities of the Caribbean. Some readers may not agree with her use of concepts such as chiefdom, corporate-network strategies, and staple-finance wealth, but she employs these reasonably as continua and heuristic devices, fully recognizing their problematic nature and tendency to mask variability. For Deagan, these concepts serve merely as starting points rather than a goal of her study.
In terms of site layout, En Bas Saline is marked by unique space-defining features, including a semiannular earthen ridge and mirroring band of residential refuse surrounding an open plaza with three contiguous mounds. Deagan's sampling entailed the excavation of nine small areas within the site's interior (elite) and periphery (nonelite), yielding fine-grained data at the scale of household (elite and nonelite) and event (elite burial and communal feasting). To best understand the nature of social inequality among households in daily and ritual life, she carefully examines the kinds and distributions of material remains within research-centered and regionally derived behavioral-functional categories, a strategy borrowed from historical archaeology and one she has been honing for the past four decades.
Diagnostic artifacts and 22 radiometric assays date the site to AD 1250–1520 and allow Deagan to track social and political changes following the Spanish invasion. Interweaving archaeological evidence and information judiciously excised from colonial-authored documents, she astutely posits that although gender-related labor roles underwent change, other aspects of Taíno culture—including political hierarchy—may have been more resilient to the initial wave of Spanish contact than previously thought.
Throughout the book, Deagan sticks to the data at hand and openly recognizes the inadequacies of site and island-wide databases, which limits the research questions posed in the book. She assumes a conservative approach in interpreting the social and political organization of En Bas Saline and opts for an admittedly oversimplistic division between elite and lesser elite. Although a more nuanced discussion of the town's polity structure would have been constructive, the model presented is reasonable and one that can be expanded or modified as more data become available.
Because of limited site excavations in Haiti and a paucity of known Taíno sites in the Caribbean with direct material evidence of early Spanish contact, Deagan felt “ethically” obligated to document “the archaeological information from En Bas Saline as comprehensively as possible,” knowing full well that some may consider her presentation “overly descriptive and empirical” (p. xix). I consider this a strength of the book. En Bas Saline is a stellar example of top-shelf archaeology that will appeal greatly to archaeologists with an inclination for empiricism. In highly readable prose, Deagan presents a thorough analysis and interpretation of site data generated through a well-conceived and well-implemented field project. Although this book does not focus on decolonizing archaeology, Deagan, in a broad sense, centers the Indigenous “Taíno” and points to the site's potential relevance to contemporary identity politics. She has set the bar high, and her work should encourage comparative analysis and continued research. This study contributes significantly to Caribbean archaeology while offering valuable insight into early-stage social, political, and material responses to Indigenous–European contact that extend well beyond the islands.
