SIBA: Stone Interchanges within the Bahama Archipelago

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper presents results from Project SIBA, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project that aims to: 1) characterise the regional social networks that bound the Lucayan archipelago to the wider Caribbean region, and; 2) provide an understanding of the creation and maintenance of indigenous exchange networks. The development of the pre-colonial socio-political networks of the Bahama archipelago is reconstructed through the geochemical, isotopic, stylistic and iconographic analysis of 300 stone artefacts now held in museum collections. Identification of the provenance of the raw materials exploited by source region is combined with a reappraisal of the distinctive cannon of Lucayan material culture in order to explore the relationships between people and the stone they worked, exchanged and valued. These relationships are embedded in a complex network of times and places that can be explored through relative chronologies established for the archipelago and geographic models of seafaring voyages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24619