The history from the Incas onward must be learned by heart, even if we do not teach of the riches of Greece, for our Greece is preferable to that Greece which is not ours.
Jose Martí (1978:8) Five hundred years away from the events that initiated the conquest and subordination of the Caribbean—the first America—by the power centers of the world, the historiography of the region still suffers from a failure to adequately disclose and discuss in an integral and coherent manner the economic processes successively imposed on the region. This is particularly true of sixteenth-century Caribbean history, in which the region consistently has been downplayed and misconstructed as a borderland at the fringes of the world. Within this traditional context, modern archaeology—mainly United States oriented—has contributed very little to the efforts of the region's inhabitants to extricate themselves from the mantle of colonial historical misinterpretations. I argue for a rereading of the early colonial period from an integral multidisciplinary perspective.
