Description:

This event will be online, and is part of our Archaeology & Heritage series.

Benoît Bérard (University of the Antilles, Archaeology) will present his work.

The West Indian archipelago was populated by groups from Central America and northern South America in two major waves of migration. This transition from a continental to a maritime, archipelagic world reflects the paradigm shift that Antillean archaeologists have undergone in recent decades. Indigenous societies, previously perceived from an essentially terrestrial perspective through the filter of insularity, are now conceived as highly interconnected and archipelagic. This new perception has led to the need to develop a new scientific project focused on the analysis of the maritimity of these populations and, more broadly, on the establishment of what could be called an archaeology of the sea. Our presentation will be structured around this approach, which combines paleoenvironmental studies, anthropology of technology, ethnoarchaeological studies, experimental maritime archaeology, computational approaches, and theoretical considerations. In this way, we will attempt to reconstruct the nature of the relationship between space and indigenous groups in the West Indies, which seems to us to be one of the essential elements for understanding them.