The book we have just finished is a journey through the Antilles that allows us to appreciate, in detail, what is happening in terms of the archaeological heritage of the region. With this epilogue, I would like to create research bridges and comparisons between the Caribbean region, as expressed in the chapters of this book, and my personal experience doing research in the Colombian Caribbean and other regions of South America. The second chapter is based on an interview with the former Kalinago Chief Irvince Auguiste. Irvince’s voice alerts us to the processes of ethnic revitalization occurring in Dominica. Although Irvince tells us that the self-determination of the Kalinago identity has met with positive acceptance in Dominican society, there is still some work to be done, for example, to diminish the prominence, in the social imaginary, of the idea of the Carib as cruel warriors who feuded with the Arawak over the islands. This case teaches us that, in the geographic basin of the Caribbean, there are processes of identity construction that seek to minimize the impact of colonial histories based on migration studies and catastrophism (Gnecco, 2002). In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, for example, various social movements, especially the Taganga social movement, based in the city of Santa Marta, also seek to make visible local histories that show that their traditions were not eradicated by the conquest, as previously believed (Daniels, 2011). In the struggle against historical biases, not only do Indigenous social movements participate, but there is also a vital critique emerging from the discipline itself. The third chapter showed us how the analysis of school texts in the Dominican Republic proves that national historiographies have had little interest in updating history. In the Colombian case, a critical battlefront has questioned national historiographies and proposals for other histories have been generated through other archaeologies (Gnecco, 2009). This has also occurred in Argentina, where the conjunction of archaeologists and Indigenous movements, especially in northwestern Argentina, has allowed for the questioning of national histories built on ethnic territories (Haber et al., 2010). In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, the Indigenous social movement has been just as forceful as elsewhere and, through its own publications, has questioned archaeological excavations as acts against sacred sites (Mestre & Rawitscher, 2018).

The political transformations demanded by the Indigenous social movement lead us to examine education. In chapter 4, we saw criticism of the disdain with which the state authorities have treated archaeological heritage in Grenada, but we could also realize the importance of the landscape as a collective property that goes beyond the idea of private property. Undoubtedly, as chapter 5 shows for the case of Saint Kitts, educational processes must usher local voices to the main stage and address the problem of decolonization of memory. Thus, visits to former sugar plantations should emphasize the dehumanization involved in slavery rather than exalt the colonial grandeur of these enterprises. Paradoxically, the awareness described in the case of Saint Kitts is totally absent from Afro-descendant social movements in Colombia, which have not yet claimed from archaeology a revision of their history and contribution to the construction of colonial society. There are notable exceptions, however, such as the case of the Palenque de San Basilio near Cartagena (Mantilla, 2011), a former libertarian settlement of the colony, where a powerful Afro-descendant movement has questioned the history of whiteness.

In chapter 6, we saw the efforts made in Jamaica toward what could be a heritage-education process, defined as creating a societal impulse to become aware of the archaeological assets of its territory. This could fit into a community archaeology that encourages citizens to acquire competencies in the value—academic, historical, and cultural—of the archaeological record (Londoño, 2021a). It is evident in South America that community archaeology does not necessarily imply a process of decolonization or a change of paradigm, but the extension of traditional archaeological thinking to the general society. In chapter 7, we saw that, in Haiti, the demands of decolonial archaeology are stronger and push away interest in practicing mere community archaeology because there are, at least, three forms of linkage with colonial traces: these are the use of colonial vestiges for house construction, the consideration of these traces as heritage, and finally the symbolization of these spaces as sites of communication with ancestors. In this framework, appears as a complex questioning of how to link colonial heritage to a narrative that does not exclude the processes of local resistance, while offering a tourist package that does not make the vacation an experience of the horrors of slavery. In Colombia, this problem has been addressed through the construction of the idea of the colony as a melting pot under the famous theory of the culture of the three ethnicities: white, Black, and Indigenous (Villalba et al., 2014). This paradigm involves managing historical resources such as archives and colonial archaeological sites as expressions of a melting pot of identity absent of conflict. At the Universidad del Magdalena, for example, after the creation of the undergraduate degree in History and Heritage Management, a museum was built in which the events of the conquest were shown as an “encounter.” Thus, the statement provided in chapter 8, documenting the cases of Guadeloupe and Martinique, is accurate in claiming that “there is no such thing as ‘heritage’ or ‘heritage objects’ having an objective reality per se.” Heritage objects are the result of representational frameworks; the more participatory they are, the more legitimacy they will have as an ideology of representation of past materialities. As is the case for other parts of the Antillean Caribbean, this case shows that the heritagization of the old sugar factories cannot be done through the exaltation of the majesty of production while obliterating the cruelties of slavery.

Moreover, it would not be possible to make these patrimonial stagings without declaring that, in the Caribbean, before Europe, industrial-scale production processes had already begun to exist, which would distort the idea of Europe as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution (Trouillot, 2002). From a decolonial perspective, the Caribbean was not only the cradle of industrial production design, but also the cradle of the praxis of resistance associated with these dynamics of domination. Thus, the proposals we have seen throughout the book interrogate these components of local agencies and their visions of history.

Chapter 9, take us to the Cuban case and how the staging of archaeological industrial heritage has been thought of. This case made it clear to us, with its reference to the work of Rolando Bustos, that heritage processes are based on actions and not on recognitions or observations; the existence of heritage is not confirmed but constructed. We had already been warned above that heritage objects are not ontologically existent, but an epistemological, ergo political, production. In this case, the heritagization of Cuba’s industrial heritage highlights the processes of constructing slave enclaves while proposing a fusion of landscape and museum spaces under the idea of the ecomuseum. This concept is essential since it points out how these initiatives link objects, communities, and territories in the planned tours. Linking history and landscape has also been tested by Indigenous people in Colombia, as in the case of the Misak in the southwest of the country (Urdaneta, 1988). Undoubtedly, this decentralization of the museum from the building system that houses collections has been an essential pillar in the processes of decolonization of the museum.

We saw in chapter 10 how “the past may be a prologue” in Barbados. This demonstrates how, on a global scale, cultural and archaeological heritage are inputs that seek to empower local voices through the search for their roots, while heritage becomes something that motivates tours and visits: routes (Clifford, 1997). Undoubtedly, the educational possibilities of cultural and archaeological heritage are adjacent to its potential for political empowerment; the people who manage these processes must deal, as in the case of Barbados, with the fact of recognizing in this heritage vestiges of processes of domination. Likewise, when certain traces become starting points for national construction, the collateral effect is the invisibilization of specific ethnic components that do not fit into the defined narratives. In this way, as the chapter demonstrates, the staging of thematic museums ends up promoting colonial images.

On a global scale, cultural and archaeological heritage are part of the theater of the symbolic dispute over the past. In the domain of heritage commodification, there has been an effort emanating from state cultural institutions to convert heritage into a commodity of enjoyment (Talalay, 2004); in the domain of social movements, there has been an imperative to reverse the vestiges of the past into evidence of a preexistence of the state that implies a differential political treatment (Londoño, 2021a). However, this political potential of heritage is not at odds with the establishment of ecosystems for managing cultural and archaeological heritage. Chapter 11, showed us the interinstitutional management that allows for the social management of heritage. The case of the Dutch Caribbean also shows us the importance of managing submerged heritage resources, which is another sphere of analysis of heritage issues. In the case of the Colombian Caribbean, Los Taganga shows that coastal communities demand management of the sea and submerged resources, including archaeological sites. The case of the wreck known as the San José Galleon has shown that wrecks such as this one should be analyzed and understood together with the Indigenous Peoples who created the wealth on that ship (Buitrago et al., 2021). As we saw in chapter 12, the concern for submerged cultural heritage is related to the individual agency of the subjects who end up, almost accidentally, being custodians of these heritages. In a certain sense, this local capacity to participate in the management of submerged archaeological heritage, as shown in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, reveals a state weakness in the management of archaeological research that should be configured into constant efforts to inject funds and generate legislation in favor of archaeological heritage.

In the case of South America, including the Colombian Caribbean, state weakness in the financing of archaeological research is concomitant with the existence of detailed legislation regulating preventive archaeology programs, in such a way that archaeological research has almost been abandoned to turn the profession into a site release technique (Londoño, 2016; Gnecco, 2018). Amid this correlation of forces, as systems of recognition of cultural differences appear, disciplines such as archaeology become instruments of the market, losing their critical potential.

Throughout this book, we have seen the unfolding of several themes that are global and that, in the continental and insular Caribbean and in Latin America in general, acquire various nuances. The issue of low state commitment to archaeological research agendas emerges. This is a problem not only for the Antilles, but also for Latin America. In most cases, doing archaeology in Latin America implies being associated with universities that require researchers to teach classes while using their vacations to do fieldwork. There is no research career in Latin American countries except Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, so archaeological research takes time from other professional activities, even requiring the sacrifice of family time. Another significant problem has to do with colonial heritage. Historical sites intended to become references of heritage often carry the burden of being the materiality of oppressive systems. People then make efforts to disarticulate these historical pressures and turn the spaces into references to the glamour of the past, erasing things like slavery. This has happened in Cartagena de Indias; the saturation of the city’s historical center with tourists takes advantage of the local workers to go through the old streets in carriages pulled by starving horses. In this way, the tourist has an impression of colonialism as an aesthetic experience and does not really have contact with the materialities of human trafficking and the role of these enslaved people in forming the city and its walls. In addition to the lack of state support for research, together with the problems of a colonial legacy, we encounter another issue: the existence of native populations for whom archaeological research is a problem in itself. In the case of the Indigenous peoples of the Colombian Caribbean, such as the Koguis, archaeological research projects are a challenge to local laws that prohibit the collection of buried or surface archaeological objects. Although Indigenous archaeology projects have been proposed (Izquierdo 2021), Indigenous methodologies are not yet part of the agenda of the full Indigenous social movement of the Colombian Caribbean. We can affirm that in the case of the Colombian Caribbean, archaeological practice must correspond to the social movement’s demands; otherwise, it would be too complicated to access sites. Moreover, the Indigenous social movements do not want a history of migrations and catastrophes, but rather a history of their survival. As we saw throughout the book, especially in the interview with Kalinago Chief Irvince Auguiste, this also happens in the Antilles; undoubtedly, amid the promotion and protection of archaeological heritage, the number of groups that claim Amerindian affiliations will increase.

In addition to these problems, the future demands research into regional history to better understand the Caribbean—i.e., not from the classical perspectives that divide it into two poles, one insular and the other continental, which are more a reflection of colonial experiences than historical dynamics, including pre-Hispanic times. Undoubtedly, the classic and monotonous questions about the famous Arawak migration on the western side, or the famous Chibcha migration on the eastern side, must give way to an understanding of the landscapes that have gestated over centuries of human occupation, which implied the establishment of circuits of exchanges that we have barely begun to learn about. Only a few years ago, some researchers created models to understand Indigenous navigation in the eastern Caribbean (Callagham & Bray, 2007), as there is no evidence of Indigenous maritime technologies except for some stone anchors found in Santa Marta, Colombia (Londoño, 2021b). However, ethnographic data reveal Indigenous marine communication technologies in the Caribbean; ethnographic work with Kalinago carpenters (Shearn, 2020) has shown the existence of traditional maritime technologies that allow us to create models to infer systems of interisland relations in pre-Hispanic times. The same occurs in the Colombian Caribbean, where Taganga carpenters teach local skills for manufacturing single-trunk canoes or monoxiles, described in early conquest documents as the Indigenous maritime technology par excellence (see e.g., Fitzpatrick, 2013).

In conclusion, the Caribbean should be looked at from other perspectives, ones that do not involve colonial prejudices, such as understanding migrations as a motivating factor for archaeological research. Likewise, the Caribbean must be viewed in its totality as a space of multiple interactions with diverse intensities. Finally, the Caribbean must be understood as a decolonial space par excellence since, in the constitution of its society, the submission of Amerindian communities and the establishment of slavery generated a culture of resistance that is undoubtedly a modern political expression. Without addressing these new fronts of work that the book opens up, we can do little to generate the epistemological and political revolutions we need in these uncertain times. In any case, we must remember Truoillot’s statement that the Caribbean is an open frontier for anthropological theory (Trouillot, 1992).