The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

68z
Louis Allaire
have spread there through the Rio Rancheria. As in Colombia, the Kusu
people were not yet agriculturalists; at least, no clay griddles, a distinctive
clay artifact used for processing bitter manioc, are associated with their
ceramic production. Their simple pottery decoration included incision
and punctation, consistent with the tecomate tradition, but some white
painting is also found. Fish bones are abundant in their site, where catfish
alone accounts for 90 percent of the faunal remains; turtle hunting also
seems to have been important. Some burials near die site are the only
indication of semipermanent habitations, but no sedentary villages are
suggested at that early stage.
In the middle Orinoco, however, the situation is somewhat different
and more complex at the onset of the second millennium B.C.E. This
fertile riverine area, which appears to have been largely unpopulated until
then, witnessed the beginnings of both pottery making and agriculture.
Of particular significance is the Ronquin locality, where a series of sites
and cultures initiated an uninterrupted local sequence of related
traditions that lasted until historic times. The earliest pottery at Ronquin
appears in the La Gruta culture, dated to the very beginnings of the
second millennium B.C.E., or to shortly before. Its excavators, however,
favored a calibrated radiocarbon date of 2750 B.C.E., which has been
received with some controversy. Until the issue is further substantiated,
it is nevertheless safe to assume that La Gruta initiated a long, series of
ceramic and cultural developments that remain distinct from the tecomate
tradition. Instead of globular vessels, new styles of shapes emphasize
keeled or composite vessels also often associated with elaborate flanged
rims. Decoration is still essentially plastic with modelings and adornos as
well as an emphasis on finely incised, or hachured, designs. Of greater
significance is the first emergence of a painted pottery tradition associated
with the distinctive white-on-red decoration that survived locally for an
extended period and became the hallmark of early ceramic styles in the
eastern Caribbean until the beginning of the Common Era. With its
composite, or bell-shaped, vessels, decorated with white-on-red painting
or fine incisions, the La Gruta occupation of Ronquin marks the earliest
appearance of the Saladoid series (named after the later Saladero site on
the Lower Orinoco), which held such a prominent role in later events in
eastern Venezuela and the Caribbean islands.
As opposed to early ceramic occupations of Colombia and Central
America, the phenomenon in the middle Orinoco is now firmly associated
with agriculture at La Gruta, in the form of bitter manioc cultivation
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