Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

3 / General Frameworks for Caribbean Prehistory
The Chronological System of Irving Rouse
The work done in Jamaica cannot be considered in isolation from that done
elsewhere in the Caribbean, and indeed it has been taken for granted by all authors
that Jamaica fits into a larger scheme of things, the outlines of which for
the most part have been determined elsewhere. When considering what the
general frameworks are, it is impossible not to begin with the late Irving Rouse,
former professor of anthropology at Yale University, who has exercised a huge
influence in the region since he started his career in the 1930s. Seven of his
works are listed in this volume in References Cited, as well as one joint work,
spanning the period from 1948 to 1992. These do not represent the whole of
his output, but they do provide an adequate guide to what he has been saying
over the years. In addition, Peter Siegel interviewed Rouse for Current Anthropology
in 1993 and his reflections on his career provide a further insight into
his main ideas (Siegel 1996).
A starting point might be provided by the two Figures here, 4 and 5, which
are adapted from Rouse’s final book The Tainos (1992:Figures 10 and 14).
Figure 5 shows what he called the “chronology of the peoples and cultures in
the Bahamian Archipelago and the Greater Antilles” going back to 4000 b.c.,
and Figure 4 shows the “advance of the Ceramic/ Archaic–age frontier through
the Caribbean” in the period from 2000 b.c. to a.d. 1500. The “end of the Archaic
Age and the beginning of the Ceramic age” frontier is shown as a thick
black line in Figure 5, so there is a link between the two. The diagram shows