Blurring Historical Lines: Cultural Divisions in the Lesser Antilles

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster presentation complicates the cultural and temporal divisions of pottery types in the Caribbean. Specifically, this work seeks to elucidate the overlapping nature of Kalinago, Taíno, European, and Maroon pottery styles in the Lesser Antilles. Using archaeological material and data from La Soye, Dominica, and reference works from across the Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean, this project displays the entangled nature of Kalinago expansion and European contact.

Douglas Armstrong, Corinne Hofman, William Keegan, and Mark Hauser, among several others, continue to make incredible strides dismantling the disjointed binaries in Caribbean Archaeology. Regrettably, these binaries have captured the public mind beyond what the archaeological and historical data supports. Not only do these cognitive divides curb the potential for cultural crossovers, but they also homogenize Caribbean cultures into simplistic, and often diametrically opposed, groups. Caribbean archaeologists are moving away from these monochromatic divisions in favor of interconnected and diversified webs of relation. Such endeavors necessitate a blurring of historical lines, including pre- and post-Columbian, indigenous and European, and Kalinago and Taíno. To buoy these efforts, this presentation expresses the emergence of these mythical binaries, and diagrams entangled and overlapping cultural artifacts in Dominica and the broader Caribbean through visual aid.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33375