Times of the Islands Fall 2021

People were living in the Caribbean for about 5,000
years before pottery became widely available. So how
did they cook their meals? Unfortunately, we don’t really
know the answer because food preparation has not
been investigated for these first inhabitants. After pottery
came to dominate archaeological assemblages, we
tended to assume that its superior qualities as cooking
vessels made other cooking techniques unnecessary. We
have recently learned that clay pots did not completely
replace other cooking methods. Because the Lucayan
Islands were settled last, and their settlements moved
frequently, preparing meals without having to carry heavy
and fragile clay pots facilitated the exploration of new
islands and the short-term exploitation of resources away
from settlements.
Even today, different meals require different cooking
methods. Some foods are roasted, broiled or grilled, and
others baked, boiled, blanched or even eaten “raw” (like
conch salad, “cooked” with lime juice). Pottery vessels are
best suited for slow cooking stews. Diversity in cooking
methods can be seen archaeologically as grilling, stone
boiling, earth ovens and the use of sea turtle shells and
baskets. Let’s look at the evidence.
The most widely recognized technique is the use of
a green-wood lattice raised above a fire to grill meats. In
fact, our word barbecue comes from the Taíno word barbacoa.
When Columbus went ashore at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, he observed an untended barbecue on which fish
and iguana were roasting. His men helped themselves to
the fish, but they left the iguana whose appearance they
found too disgusting-looking to eat. Grilling on an open
flame or roasting in the hot coals have passed the test
of time and remain popular, practically a national pastime,
today. But not all foods lend themselves to cooking
directly on the heat source, especially liquids.
Several aboriginal cooking methods involve the use
of “hot rocks,” with these distinguished by differences in
the types of rocks used and their placement in relation
to the heating source. Hearths are an example of rocks
arranged in a pit below the fire. When the fire burns down
to coals, the stones lining the hearth radiate heat and
facilitate cooking on the coals. At the Coralie site (GT-3)
on Grand Turk we found hearths constructed from limestone
and conch shells on which the shell (carapace) of
a sea turtle was used as a cooking vessel. Some of the
turtle bones were still in place on top of hearths and they
showed charring from having been burned on one side.
GT-3 is the only site in all of the Caribbean where this
cooking method has been reported.
A second type of hot rock cooking involves the place-
MARK PARRISH
This complete pottery bowl from Hispaniola was recovered underwater in a cave in the Caicos Islands.
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