The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

are typical of the unique Jamaican canteen. As De Booy noted, despite the
similar use of incision and appliqué decorations, the pottery in Jamaica is considerably
different from that found on neighbouring islands. Land snails
(Pleurodonte acuta) were the dominant molluscs in the deposits, but marine
taxa (Arca, Strombus and Fasciolaria) were also observed. A year later, G.C.
Longley (1914) provided supplementary information to De Booy’s Jamaican
investigations.
The initial phase of archaeological investigation consisted of simple
descriptions of site locations and artefacts from pre-Columbian sites. For
example, Sven Lovén (1932) reported the discovery of projectile points
(“stone dart points”) from Old Harbour, St Catherine. Projectile points are
not common in West Indian sites, and there is some question as to what these
mean in terms of Jamaican archaeology (Harris 1991). Some effort was made
to interpret how the native peoples of Jamaica might have lived by using the
reports from the early Spanish chroniclers (Sherlock 1939); however, there
was little attempt to determine the accuracy of the Spanish characterization
of the Taíno. Moreover, because the Spanish tended to report that all of the
peoples on these islands were the same, there has been a tendency among ethnohistorians
to generalize as well. For example, religious beliefs recorded
among the Macorix of central Hispaniola have been used to characterize
Taíno religious beliefs on all of the islands (see Bourne 1906).
This phase of investigation had run out of steam by the 1930s. Lovén
(1935) published an encyclopaedic summary of ethnohistoric reports and
archaeological investigations, The Origins of the Taínan Culture, West Indies.By
the time this synthesis was published, there seemed to be nothing new that
could be learned from collecting the artefacts of Jamaica’s prehistoric peoples.
Thus, the 1930s saw a shift in interest toward Jamaica’s Hispanic heritage
(Aarons 1983b, 1984), epitomized by the work of Charles S. Cotter. After
the 1940s, archaeological interest was focused on the historic sites, primarily
Port Royal, Kingston and Sevilla la Nueva (New Seville), St Ann.
Chronological Order
Initial efforts to arrange the events of the past in historical order were based
on the development of “relative” chronologies. One of the basic principles of
archaeology is the law of superposition, which states that the deepest artefacts
in a deposit generally are the oldest. In a midden (garbage heap), for instance,
later deposits bury the first objects discarded. There is always the possibility
that later activities can disturb the sequence (for example, when a burial pit is
dug into existing deposits), but with careful attention to the integrity of strata,
the observer can identify such disturbances. By developing sequences of arte-
T HE
D EVELOPMENT OF J AMAICAN P REHISTORY
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