SIBA: The Research Potential of Bahamian/TCI Museum Collections

Summary

Project SIBA (Stone Interchanges in the Bahamas Archipelago) brings together the largest corpus of Bahamian/TCI stone artefacts ever assembled - over 300 artefacts from eight international museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History. In an entirely limestone environment like the Bahamas/TCI, all hard stone had to be imported: our objective is to determine the source of these exotics. Integrating studies that combine the arts with state-of-the-art minimal-invasive laser ablation sampling for isotope studies, we aim to explore the wider social, political and economic connections between the archipelago and its wider Caribbean setting. The selected artefacts, including celts and anthropo/zoomorphic carvings, have well-documented collection histories, forming an exceptionally rich corpus for investigating materials and meanings. Museum collections offer a unique opportunity to study artefacts that are now rarely encountered in the archaeological record: in the Bahamas, such artefacts were mainly deposited in caves that were largely cleared for the guano-rich soils in the 19th century. Museum collections are therefore an integral component when looking at the wider archaeological context for these islands: without them, we loose connection to a large and important body of material that had clear value and meaning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22008