The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

These two types form the main origins of early Jamaican pottery. A subphase
known as the Montego Bay style (see Figure 10.1) is said to be less
striking in its deviation from the main Jamaican pottery tradition, particularly
in its use of incision. This ceramic substyle is found in the western section of
the island – for instance, at Fairfield, St James.
Fabrication Method
Taíno hand-coiled pottery reached an aesthetic level comparable to that of
more advanced ceramic cultures. Taíno potters are documented as having had
good knowledge of local clays, which they used extensively to fashion a wide
range of shapes for varying uses. To strengthen the fabric of the fired pottery,
they first tempered the clays with substances such as sand, ash, crushed shell
or vegetable fibres. The Taíno, it is presumed, would lay out coils vertically, in
concentric circles, for bowls and jars, and horizontally for plates and flat-bottomed
vessels, such as buréns. Modelling with their hands, they smoothed and
fused the coils together. They also employed the paddle-and-anvil technique
to thin and compress the clay walls of their pots: the anvil is held inside the pot
while the paddle is used on the outside. This process resulted in thin-walled,
lightweight pots, some of which can be seen in our heritage museums.
Pottery Forms
Figure 10.2 Normal
boat-shaped vessel.
(Institute of Jamaica
Collection.)
A large percentage of Taíno pottery exhibits a low lustre on both exterior and
interior surfaces as a result of burnishing without a gilt or slip. Burnishing is
a process of smoothing leather-hard clay with a hard object, like a smooth
pebble, for decorative purposes and to give a hard,
dense coating to unglazed ware.
The corpus of Taíno pottery included bowls for
cooking and serving, effigy vessels, buréns (cassava
griddles), body stamps and other forms of human
and zoomorphic designs for ancestral worship. But
the two basic shapes that remained intrinsic to
Jamaican Taíno pottery are the round and boatshaped
bowls. The boat, or oval, shape is the more
common of the two (Figure 10.2). These vessels
usually have both ends elevated and often terminate in cylindrical or flat handles
that flare at the tips. An alternative design has only one end elevated,
resulting in a calabash shape. When the boat-shaped vessel is devoid of terminal
handles, the stems or projecting ends are modelled to form thickened
148 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS