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Papers by Sébastien Manem

Reimagining Creolization: The Deep History of Cultural Interactions in the Windward Islands, Lesser Antilles, through the Lens of Material Culture

Latin American Antiquity, 2022

People from different areas of the insular Caribbean and the coastal zone of mainland South Ameri... more People from different areas of the insular Caribbean and the coastal zone of mainland South America moved in and out of the Lesser Antilles throughout the archipelago's history before the European invasion. Successive migrations, the development of networks of human mobility, and the exchange of goods and ideas, as well as constantly shifting inter-insular alliances, created diverse ethnic and cultural communities in these small islands. We argue that these processes of alliance-building and ethnicity can be best understood through the concept of creolization. We examine this idea first in terms of the cultural interactions reflected in the pottery traditions that emerged among the Windward Islands before colonization, and second by analyzing the historiographical and emerging archaeological information available on the formation of the Indigenous Kalinago/Kalipuna and Garifuna identities from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Finally, we discuss the colonial and contemporary Afro-Caribbean pottery traditions on these islands, in particular Grenada and Saint Lucia. The embedding of this study in a deep historical framework serves to underscore the divergent origins and developmental trajectories of the region. including the disruption of the Indigenous cultures and the impact of European colonization, the African diaspora, and the emergence of today's cosmopolitan Caribbean cultural tradition.

Cayo in the Lesser Antilles: a Network of Peoples, Places and Practices in the Late 15th to Early 17th Century

Koriabo: from Caribbean Sea to the Amazon River. Barreto et al. (eds), 2020

This chapter focuses on our new research by discussing the Kalínago settlement organisation and v... more This chapter focuses on our new research by discussing the Kalínago settlement organisation and village layout at the sites of Argyle (St. V incent) and La Poterie (Grenada) which provide the context for discussing the Cayo material culture repertoire and related practices. First, we shall present our excavation results, corroborating the settlement data with the available ethnohistorical information on the Kalínago dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. Collaboration with the contemporary Kalínago communities in the Windward Islands, notably on Dominica, St. Vincent and Trinidad, has been crucial in the interpretation of these data and has resulted in the recent (experimental) reconstruction of the archaeological Cayo village at Argyle International Airport on St. Vincent at the site of the excavations. Secondly, we focus on the Cayo material culture repertoire. Especially the techniques of production of the Cayo ceramics and the diversity of local Cayo styles shall be discussed, reflecting the plurality of peoples that produced and used this pottery. Finally, a revised narrative of the resistance and the re-negotiating of the indigenous identities at the eve of the colonial encounters will be presented as seen from the material culture record.

Modeling the Evolution of Ceramic Traditions Through a Phylogenetic Analysis of the Chaînes Opératoires: the European Bronze Age as a Case Study

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2020

The chaînes opératoires underlying the manufacture of objects are good proxies for studying socia... more The chaînes opératoires underlying the manufacture of objects are good proxies for studying social groups and how cultural traits are transmitted and modified through the learning process. With the rise of evolutionary archaeology, the evolution of ceramic vessels can be modeled by using cladistics to elaborate kinship relationships between different taxa on the basis of shared derived character states. Here the modeling applies to ceramic fashioning from the European Middle Bronze Age (France and the United Kingdom). The aim is to assess the nature of the evolution and the relationships between three main cultures—in southern England, Normandy, and in the center-west of France. The cladistics analysis highlights that the ceramic traditions largely result from a process of phylogenesis—a result of descent with modification from an ancestral assemblage—rooted in the Early Bronze Age, suggesting a common origin for the Trevisker/Deverel-Rimbury and French Atlantic technical traditions. On the other hand, the Norman appears to be related to the Duffaits tradition, but to the exclusion of the Trevisker/Deverel-Rimbury traditions. This study supports the theoretical premise that some technical sequences are more stable than others. The evolution of sequences requiring motor habits, such as shaping, stabilized fairly quickly, unlike the finishing operations that continued to diverge throughout the Bronze Age. This study suggests that cladistics based on the description of the ceramic material in terms of chaînes opératoires is a useful tool for studying cultural change.

Bronze Age ceramic traditions and the impact of the natural barrier: complex links between decoration, technique and social groups around the Channel

MOVEMENT, EXCHANGE AND IDENTITY IN EUROPE IN THE 2ND AND 1ST MILLENNIA BC beyond frontiers

The Bronze Age Use of Caves in France: Reinterpreting their Functions and the Spatial Logic of their Deposits through the Chaîne Opératoire Concept

Caves constitute an important archaeological support for understanding French Bronze Age cultures... more Caves constitute an important archaeological support for understanding French Bronze Age cultures. Over several decades, many studies have demonstrated a diversity of cave functions, independently of cultural context. Caves were used for ritual and funerary practices but also in everyday life, or occasionally for economic functions, as dwelling place or for protection during periods of insecurity. Different arguments are used to support these interpretations but paradoxically the same elements are generally used to argue for a ritual or dwelling function. This complex question of cave function hides a fundamental debate about these European Bronze Age societies: were they really troglodyte? Why did people deposit and abandon so many goods in the caves? This article demonstrate the real difficulties in establishing hypotheses of function, and propose another reference point based on the study of technical behavior, using the concept of chaîne opératoire. The study is focused on the Duffaits Culture and the analysis of pottery which constitutes the main material deposited by Bronze Age people in these caves.

Considérer les cultures dans leur « épaisseur », leur histoire, revient à comprendre les processu... more Considérer les cultures dans leur « épaisseur », leur histoire, revient à comprendre les processus de transmission qui s'opèrent de génération en génération. 1 Si les techniques de fabrication des objets constituent un domaine de prédilection dans ce cadre d'approche, 2 plusieurs auteurs évoquent l'importance du paysage comme moyen de transmettre l'histoire et l'identité culturelle. 3 À l'instar de la notion de culture, le terme « paysage » (« landscape ») prend un grand nombre de définitions. Dans le cadre de cet article, la définition de M. Johnson est l'une des plus appropriées 4 : « 1. The "land" itself, however defined : the humanly created features that exist "objectively" across space, and their natural context. Landscape archaeology in this sense is a very simple term to define: it is about what lies beyond the site, or the edge of the excavation. 2. How "the land" is viewed -how we, and people in the past, came to apprehend and understand the landscape, and what those systems of apprehension and understanding are, the cognitive systems and processes of perception ». Cette définition peut être complétée par celle de B. David et J. Thomas : « Landscape archaeology is an archaeology of how people visualized the world and how they engaged with one another across space, how they chose to manipulate their surroundings or how they were subliminally affected to do things by way of their locational circumstances. It concerns the intentional and the unintentional, the physical and the spiritual, human agency and the subliminal (...) ». 5 La perception d'un paysage naturel étant propre à chaque culture, elle est insaisissabledans toute sa profondeur -pour un visiteur étranger ou des groupes culturels qui occuperont un jour le même territoire. 6 On parle alors des « aspects géographiques de la culture invi-1 Shennan 2002. 2 Stark et al. 2008.

Book Chapters by Sébastien Manem

When rigidity invents flexibility to preserve some stability in the transmission of pottery-making during the European Middle Bronze Age

Charbonneau, M. (ed.) The Evolution of Techniques: Rigidity and Flexibility in Use, Transmission, and Innovation. MIT Press, Vienna Series of Theoretical Biology, 2024

Cayo in the Lesser Antilles: A network of peoples, places and practices in the late 15th to early 17th century

Koriabo, from the Caribbean Sea to the Amazon River, 2021

Conference Presentations by Sébastien Manem