The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

history. Yet self-awareness at a variety of different levels is important.
According to Bob Marley, “If you know your history, then you will know
where you’re coming from.” Jamaica needs to relish its past, but at the same
time its archaeologists need to move toward using Jamaican prehistory to
broaden our understanding of West Indian history.
Artefactual Research
An early interest in Native American archaeology can be traced to the eighteenth
century. American archaeologists have dated the founding of their
discipline to excavations conducted by Thomas Jefferson in 1780 on his property
in Virginia (Thomas 1979). Yet Edward Long (1774) had already
described prehistoric artefacts in Jamaica. These early forays into prehistoric
archaeology certainly generated an interest in artefacts from the past, yet these
remained isolated in the “curiosity cabinets” of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
Jamaican Taíno artefacts, particularly the wooden zemís (representations of
supernatural spirits), have been a subject of curiosity since the eighteenth century.
George “Tony” Aarons (1994) has written about the discovery of
Jamaican zemís before 1757. One of the most spectacular Jamaican discoveries
was three wooden zemís from Carpenter’s Mountain (Manchester) found
in 1792. The Carpenter’s Mountain zemís are individually referred to as the
“Bird Man”, the “Rain Deity” and the “Man with the Canopy”. These zemís
were presented to the British Museum in 1799 (ibid.).
It was not until the late nineteenth century that a more formal interest in
the archaeology of the Americas developed. In the United States, the
Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846 with a gift from James
Smithson of England, and in 1916 the George G. Heye Foundation in New
York established a museum that is currently being transformed into the
Museum of the American Indian. Moreover, the Field Museum in Chicago
sponsored the Colombian Exposition in 1893–94. Among the attractions of
that World’s Fair was an exhibition of Native American encampments, presented
as a kind of human zoo. Today we view this exploitation of native peoples
as an unfortunate episode in the history of American anthropology.
What many people fail to realize is that Jamaica’s history rivals that of its
North American neighbour. Founded in 1879 by then Governor Sir Anthony
Musgrave, the Institute of Jamaica is one of the oldest cultural heritage organizations
in the Americas. The Institute of Jamaica played a formidable role in
the development of Jamaican archaeology, being responsible for all archaeological
expeditions, surveys and exhibitions from its inception up to the mid-
1980s. In the 1890s, the Institute of Jamaica was pivotal in the emergence of
T HE
D EVELOPMENT OF J AMAICAN P REHISTORY
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