Benjamin Irving Rouse (August 29, 1913 – February 24, 2006) was an American archaeologist on the faculty of Yale University best known for his work in the Greater and Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean, especially in Haiti.
[3] Rouse began his academic career studying forestry and obtained his bachelor's degree in plant science from Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School in 1934.
Rouse identifies his background in botany as a major factor in his lifelong interest in classification and taxonomy.
As an undergraduate, he worked at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History cataloging archaeological specimens.
[10] Rouse was a major contributor to the study of Caribbean archaeology, and his contribution to this field began with his dissertation, which was broken down into two parts and dealt with the culture of the Ft. Liberté region of Haiti.
There is evidence of a workshop for the manufacture of the axes in the area, however it appears that the flint objects were made elsewhere, indicating that there was probably some sort of trade system in place.
He suspected the Couri groups were semi-nomadic and band-like in structure due to the small, shallow nature of the sites excavated.
One particular type of cooking pottery that was popular in the region both in the Meillac and Carrier groups (discussed below) was the "pepper pot", a vessel in which most of their prepared food was made.
Rouse identifies the Meillac groups as sedentary agriculturist, who relied not only on shellfish, seafood, and birds for subsistence, but they also probably cultivated corn and manioc and collected wild vegetables.
There was some evidence of cutting on human remains found at Meillac sites, leading Rouse to believe that cannibalism may have been occurring.
The only art known from these groups comes from decoration on cooking pots, which included linear geometric drawings and modeled heads.
Rouse believes that Carrier people spoke the Arawak language, and were sedentary agriculturalist who hunted small animals and shellfish and, like Meillac groups, cultivated manioc and corn, along with other wild vegetables.
Rouse began doing fieldwork in the Caribbean in 1934, when he worked in Haiti on the material that would lead to his dissertation.
[16] In 1941, Rouse and Osgood conducted research in Cuba which resulted in each publishing half of an edition of a Yale University Publications in Anthropology volume in 1942.
[17] Rouse's segment was titled Archaeology of the Maniabon Hills, Cuba where he examined artifacts from a number of sites in Cuba and classifies them as either having been inhabited by Ciboney Indians or Sub-Tainos[18] Rouse spent time in 1946 in Trinidad, working with John Albert Bullbrook on his 1953 manuscript Excavations at Wari, Ayacucho, Peru and on the Excavations of a Shell Mound at Palo Seco, Trinidad, B. W. I..
They were not hunting the same type of big-game animals as the Paleo-Indians were, as that food source became extinct by the time the Meso-Indian epoch started.
[21] One major contribution Rouse made to Caribbean archaeology involves the reconstruction of the migrations that were responsible for the populating of the islands.
Rouse believed that the population of the Caribbean occurred in four migrations from mainland South America [22] The first migration came in what Rouse called the "lithic" age, which happened around 6000 years ago based on the dates of the earliest sites on the islands.
This was the culture, which was fairly complex in social structure, that was first encountered by Old World explorers, most notably Christopher Columbus.
A review of this publication outlines the general technique Rouse believed would be most useful in studying migrations.
The archaeologist must create testable hypotheses and inferences, with emphasis placed upon local development, acculturation, and transculturation.
On the contrary, the movement asserts that there are still many Taíno peoples still in existence (especially in areas like Puerto Rico) who aim to show that their culture was never destroyed, despite what history books say.
The end product of analytic classification is the "mode", which is produced by creating a series of classes representing different features of the artifact.
[33] On July 24, 1939, Rouse married Mary Mikami, a fellow graduate student in anthropology at Yale.
David continued the family tradition by becoming an urban landscape architect, while Peter worked as chief of staff for both Tom Daschle and Barack Obama in the United States Senate.