The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

11
Jamaican
Redware
J AMES
W. LEE
A DISTINCTIVE ABORIGINAL pottery style found in eleven
Jamaican occupation sites has been named Redware because of the characteristic
red slip applied to parts of some vessels. Lieutenant Commander J.S.
Tyndale-Biscoe, an English surveyor and amateur archaeologist, had noticed,
long before 1933, that many potsherds from the dry southern coastal areas of
St Elizabeth parish showed an unmistakable red slip, but he had no occasion
to write about his discovery, nor did he realize until much later (1962) that
this was a separate culture both in style and time from other Arawak settlements
in Jamaica.
Howard (1956) described in some detail the ceramics of the “Little River
style” and agreed with De Wolf (1953) that, chronologically, it belonged to
Rouse’s period IIIa (Rouse 1951, 1964). Ronald L. Vanderwal, then government
archaeologist, had charcoal from the Alligator Pond site (M-4) tested in
1965 and gave the date as AD 650 ± 120 (Vanderwal 1968a). By comparison,
the earliest date so far determined for White Marl type-sites in Jamaica is AD
900. Recent work at the Rodney’s House site (S-5) by John Wilman (1978)
suggests the possibility of an age at that location pre-dating the White Marl
site but with the same style of pottery.
Lee (1976a) summarized the Redware status as of that date and later
(1978c) reviewed the overall picture of this culture in a paper submitted to the
Ponce conference in August 1978.
Redware Sites
Except for the two most recently discovered occupation sites (which are both
about 1 km inland), all the Redware settlements were directly on the seashore
Originally published in 1980, in Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress for the
Study of Pre-Columbian Cultures of the Lesser Antilles, St Kitts, 1979: 597–609.
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