Exchanges Interamerican Dialogue Archaeology in the Guianas Denis Williams Defined by the courses of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers and their bridging stream, the Casiquiare Canal, the "Island of Guiana" of early exploration today comprises the national territories of Guyana, Suriname, of metropolitan France to this day, and prospects for its political and economic advancement are not encouraging.
Figure 1 Among the relatively recent immigrant populations of these "Three Guianas" (African, East Indian, Chinese, Indonesian), the concept of history pertains to specific ancestral concerns that relate to identity and survival, and scarcely to the notion of cultural evolution for the Guiana area as a whole. There is, in addition, the "problem" of the non-immigrant Native Guyanese whose historical concerns embrace the entire territory and who implacably views all non-natives as intruders. However, with an area of some 1.6 x 10 km In Guyana, for example, the taking of "state lands" has restricted the reservations of Native Guyanese to semi-arid areas or areas of tropical savanna. Large expanses of the rain forests have been sequestered in the national interest for logging or mineral extraction by expatriate concerns. Some 3,600 km of primary rain forest have been set aside for the Commonwealth and Government of Guyana Iwokrama Rain Forest Programme, which has been designed to develop and demonstrate methods of sustainable management of tropical forests. The associated developments of highways is regarded as an irreversible threat to the survival of long-held lifeways (Figure 2). With reference to indigenous history, a Native Guyanese scholar has recently published an eight-point classification of threats that are perceived to circumscribe the native effort at self-determination: tribal, pestilential, legislative, land, corporate, natural, cultural, and, above all, the threat of unbridled miscegenation. | |
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