From Sea to Shining Sea: The Influence of Bill Dickinson’s Pacific Island Ceramic Petrography on Caribbean Research

Summary

Bill Dickinson’s research in the Pacific is widely known and considered to be one of the most exemplary cases of transdisciplinary research between archaeologists and the geosciences. The collaborative effort cultivated between Dickinson and the archaeological community over the last 50 years has led to new ways of understanding how and when peoples colonized islands, and the exchange systems that developed through time, among other important issues. One of the most significant outcomes of these partnerships has been the crossing over of Dickinson’s petrographic techniques to other scholars and regions. In this paper, we highlight how Dickinson’s analytical protocols and research questions have been applied to the Caribbean, which are pivotal to understanding how lithic and clay resources were used by Amerindian groups prehistorically. Ironically, while pottery often comprises more than 90% of the artifact assemblages found in Pre-Columbian Caribbean sites during the Ceramic Age (ca. 2500-500 BP), petrography is widely underused and underappreciated. Our research, some of the first of its kind in this region, focuses on the analysis of pottery assemblages from several islands in the southern Caribbean that provides a critical baseline for examining how peoples in the past acquired and used resources to manufacture pottery.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• An Archaeologist’s Geologist: A Symposium in Honor of William R. Dickinson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage