This reluctance of a significant number of archaeologists to accept African influences in the material culture of Afro-American contexts is due to a variety of reasons. There is barely any correspondence between the material culture  
of North American and Caribbean contexts and African contexts, pointing to rapid processes of material homogenization and cultural creolization. In this sense, much of the material repertoire in evidence is linked to the model of creolization put forward by Mintz and Price (1976). This model emphasizes multicultural interaction and exchange between a variety of groups, resulting in the establishment of new cultural forms. The authors claimed that the great heterogeneity of Africans in the Americas may have fed a process of rapid creolization, through which enslaved people adjusted to their new social environments and created new institutions and cultural forms as a reaction to the oppressive conditions of enslavement. In this sense, the idea of the existence of more culturally specific retentions for sources in certain regions of Africa is rejected, owing to its link to the outdated paradigm of acculturation and its essentialist notion of ethnic identities as sets of crystallized cultural traits, transmitted through generations and affected only by contact with other cultural groups (Cusick, 1998). In studies on the African diaspora, this concept is linked to ideas developed by Melville Herskovits (1941), who coined the term 'Africanism' to refer to the maintenance of practices and customs that originated on the African continent. Herskovits believed that West and Central Africa formed a large cultural area, resulting in a high level of cultural homogeneity among populations enslaved in the Americas. This would explain why African populations that maintained closer contacts with Euro-American culture tended to be less 'cultured', retaining a greater number of African cultural traits.