The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

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Section 4 Taíno Art Forms ART IS A CRITICAL and continual aspect of the human experience. Art, regardless of chronology and geographic locale, has been used to express thoughts, emotions, beliefs and events. It can be religious, functional, aesthetic or documentary. Ramón Dacal Moure and Manuel Rivero de la Calle, in Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba (1996), categorize the art of the Taíno into idolillos, wooden idols, figurines, duhos and cave art. Caves were used by the Taínos as shrines, burial sites, temporary shelters, water sources and rock art sites. Since the eighteenth century, caves in Jamaica have provided invaluable evidence of Taíno culture and art forms. Cave art can be broken down into two main categories: mobiliary art and cave art proper. In Jamaica, there is evidence of both categories. Mobiliary art consists of small objects found inside caves; examples include the wooden zemís found in Carpenter’s Mountain, Manchester (1799), and Aboukir, St Ann (1992). Cave art proper consists of petroglyphs – carvings – and pictographs – paintings – found inside caves. Petroglyphs can be located on almost every Caribbean island, in both the Greater and the Lesser Antilles (Bullen 1974). In Jamaica, the earliest known petroglyph site was the Dryland Cave, St Mary, from 1820. This site is now known as One Bubby Susan, found in Woodside, St Mary. The Mountain River Cave, St Catherine, is the earliest known pictograph site, discovered in 1896 (Duerden 1897). The two chapters in this section discuss the Taíno art forms found in Jamaica. James W. Lee’s paper “The Petroglyphs of Jamaica” was published in 1990. It highlights the discovery of cave art sites before 1952 and sites discovered between 1952 and 1985. Lee discusses the motifs of the petroglyphs and pictographs, and identifies a spatial relationship between cave art sites and occupation sites. Lee identified twenty-four cave art sites; since then an addi- 175
tional eleven sites have been discovered. The highest concentration of cave art sites in Jamaica is found in the southern parishes of Clarendon, St Elizabeth, St Catherine and Manchester. Ethnographic data reveal that Jamaican Taínos are renowned for several things – cotton, cassava bread, celts and, most important, wooden idols. After he assessed the three wooden sculptures from Carpenter’s Mountain in 1792, William Faggs said: It is remarkable, since rather few figures in wood have been found in the Americas, that this one tribe, the Arawak, has produced so many works of supreme sculptural merit, fit to be compared with the best tribal works of the other continents, and, so far as the surviving works allow us to judge, probably the finest works of wood sculpture produced in the Americas before or since Columbus. (National Gallery of Jamaica 1992, 4) Cave art sites in Jamaica are not as common as burial caves, and wooden zemís found in caves are considered rare treasures. Nicholas Saunders and Dorrick Gray, in their chapter “Zemís, Trees and Symbolic Landscapes: Three Taíno Carvings from Jamaica”, discuss the most important Taíno find in Jamaica since the eighteenth century – the Aboukir zemís recovered in 1992. The Aboukir finds include a ceremonial staff, a bird figure and a small ceremonial ladle or spoon, which are now housed in the National Gallery of Jamaica. Saunders and Gray re-examine the place of wooden zemís in Taíno religion. They highlight the importance of the zemís, the selection of the wood used in their creation and the Taíno perception of the natural world. The authors then demonstrate similarities between the Taíno view of the natural world and that of the lowland Amazon societies. Since the discovery of the Aboukir zemís, a wooden duho has been recovered from the Hellshire Hills, St Catherine. This duho, dated AD 1000–1170, is currently housed in the National Gallery of Jamaica. Thus an estimated thirteen wooden objects have been obtained from Jamaican caves, located in the parishes of Manchester, St Thomas, St Ann and St Catherine. 176 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS
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The Earliest Inhabitants
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University of the West Indies Press
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Contents List of Illustrations / ix
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Illustrations A.1 Map of the sites
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13.2 Petroglyphs from Coventry and
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Preface I HAVE ALWAYS been fascinat
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Acknowledgements I WOULD FIRST like
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Introduction IN JAMAICA, THE indige
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encounter the term Arawaks used to
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90. Long Acre Point 91. Long Mounta
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ical publication in Jamaica. Geolog
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collections. Knowledge of the prove
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Section 1 Assessment and Excavation
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objective by using a frame of refer
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16 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS two
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18 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS fact
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20 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS the
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22 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS deco
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Howard (1965) recognized that Redwa
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people making Ostionan (Redware) po
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was the recovery of the Aboukir zem
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Appendix Table 1.1 Midden Sites Rep
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Table 1.2 Cave Sites Reported by Ro
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2 The Taíno Settlement of the King
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Henderson Hill lies to the south, o
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ivalves. Single gastropod valves we
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40 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS Taí
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Table 2.2 Neutron Activation Analys
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Plain may have played a role in the
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Table 2.3. Taíno Sites in the King
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contractors to drill and blast for
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chipped away. It is believed that t
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Figure 3.4 JNHT excavations at Chan
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Test Pit 6 Depth 40 cm. This is a s
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19.375 19.275 1 CHANCERY HALL, JAMA
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Appendix A Laboratory Study of the
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Table 3.1 All Recovered Organic Mat
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of slim, more or less parallel shap
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Table 3.5 Fish Bone Anatomical Part
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66 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS Surv
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Acknowledgements Thanks are due to
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SOUTH NEGRIL POINT Savannala-Mar Mo
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sudden event. Occupation 3 can be c
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dle, a ground stone artefact that m
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- infrastructural development throu
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emoval. Sometimes what is required
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Figure 5.1 Road cutting through the
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Later on the Spanish settled in the
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Figure 5.4 Long Mountain prior to d
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86 T HE E ARLIEST I NHABITANTS amon
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6 Notes on the Natural History of J
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Soils Several different soil types
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Shoreline On the north coast, there
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well established, especially in dis
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7 The Exploitation and Transformati
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Art Art can be religious, functiona
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of Long Mountain”, Andreas Oberli
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Figure 7.3 William Keegan explainin
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cedar (Cedrela odorata), santa mari
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According to Rouse, the density of
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17), grows abundantly on the island
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Incidental Dispersal The plant comp
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8 Early Arawak Subsistence Strategi
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and bagged by level. In April of 19
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Table 8.1 Significant Vertebrate an
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tory and habitat preferences. Follo
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Changing Subsistence Strategies The
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Table 8.2 Faunal Comparisons: Per c
Page 142 and 143: Appendix Table 8.3 Rodney’s House
Page 144 and 145: Table 8.3 Rodney’s House Faunal L
Page 146 and 147: Section 3 Analysis of Taíno Archae
Page 148 and 149: 9 Petrography and Source of Some Ar
Page 150 and 151: The results discussed here were obt
Page 152 and 153: Petaloid Axes of Arawak Origin from
Page 154 and 155: Blue Schist The story of Jamaican b
Page 156 and 157: Coleraine) but also from other majo
Page 158 and 159: from which several Jamaican artefac
Page 160 and 161: in a lack of suitable rocks, so tha
Page 162 and 163: A surprising conclusion of the pres
Page 164 and 165: Figure 10.1 Redware, White Marl and
Page 166 and 167: triangular ridges. It is thought th
Page 168 and 169: (also see Figure 10.6), loop handle
Page 170 and 171: 11 Jamaican Redware J AMES W. LEE A
Page 172 and 173: only if planted at exactly the corr
Page 174 and 175: Handles Handles may be classified i
Page 176 and 177: Two more or less spheroidal pottery
Page 178 and 179: 12 Taíno Ceramics from Post-Contac
Page 180 and 181: and distribution of native labour w
Page 182 and 183: Figure 12.2 Distribution of New Sev
Page 184 and 185: hatching (Figure 12.5c), and closel
Page 186 and 187: were fired at a low temperature, th
Page 188 and 189: Figure 12.11 New Seville ware: jug
Page 190 and 191: ters of the caciques. These politic
Page 194 and 195: 13 The Petroglyphs of Jamaica J AME
Page 196 and 197: previously described petroglyphs ex
Page 198 and 199: glyphs in that belt, as the geologi
Page 200 and 201: Another carving that is unique is t
Page 202 and 203: Appendix Table 13.2 Jamaican Petrog
Page 204 and 205: 14 Zemís, Trees and Symbolic Lands
Page 206 and 207: According to Arrom and Rouse (1992)
Page 208 and 209: The Context of Sacredness Taíno wo
Page 210 and 211: Kept in niches or on tables within
Page 212 and 213: Another important correspondence be
Page 214 and 215: eliefs in the spiritual and life-gi
Page 216 and 217: References Aarons, G.A. 1983a. Arch
Page 218 and 219: Smithsonian Biological Survey of Do
Page 220 and 221: ———. 1988. Ulysses’ Sail: A
Page 222 and 223: ———. 1983b. Adornos, Jamaica
Page 224 and 225: Porro, A. 1994. Social organization
Page 226 and 227: Scudder, S. 1992. Early Arawak subs
Page 228 and 229: Wing, E.S., and A.B. Brown. 1979. P
Page 230 and 231: Rouse, I. 1982. Ceramic and religio
Page 232: M. John Roobol, is a consultant geo
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The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

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