Beyond Styles and Modes: Taking a Closer Look at Ceramic Changes in the Greater Antilles

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Undoubtedly, one of the most important developments in human history is the invention pottery. In archaeology alone, it is difficult to imagine how much the discipline would have learned without it. Thanks to pottery we have been able to advance studies in diet, production, chronology, religion, long and short distance interaction, aspects of identity, and many other topics. However, at least in the case of the Caribbean, one topic that has been ignored is explaining why and how ceramic styles changed. In this presentation we discuss two cases of marked pottery changes: one from Puerto Rico and the second from Dominican Republic. The first case focuses on the Santa Elena style (or Elenan subseries) from Puerto Rico, a style that appears dramatically in the eastern side without any antecedents and it is abandoned 300 years later. The second is the Chican subseries, a type of pottery that developed originally in Dominican Republic replacing the local styles and eventually influencing the pottery from other islands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51285