Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

40 / Chapter 3.
simply be to move everything nearer to the present, but to blur the lines
between the entities named in the boxes.
2. There are other factors that tend to blur those lines, both in respect to the
Ceramic/ Archaic–Age frontier and the Ceramic Age entities themselves.
First, the criteria usually invoked are not always sufficient to differentiate
supposed Archaic age sites from Ceramic Age stone raw material procurement
sites. The absence of pottery is not always an infallible indicator
of age. Second, conservatism in the use of pottery, particularly on
the periphery, means that sharp lines for the Ceramic boxes are illusory.
As Keegan puts it, Rouse’s charts imply that “everyone in an area suddenly
abandoned the old style and adopted the new,” but this is not the case.
3. The above are boundary problems. Much more serious is the claim that,
“it is not clear that pottery decoration adequately reflects meaningful
social units,” and that it may not represent a “people and culture,” as consistently
assumed by Rouse (Keegan 2000:138–139). The most telling
example quoted is that of the Cedrosan Saladoid, which, as we have seen,
had a key role to play in Rouse’s system. Keegan points out that most Saladoid
pottery is not decorated. Hence it is possible that the highly decorated
vessels (for which this entity is well known) constituted no more
than a “veneer shared by local groups, a sort of pottery lingua franca,
which would have acted to reinforce social ties between islands and over
long distances.” “When viewed as a social process, Cedrosan Saladoid pottery
may be telling us more about the social alliances required to survive
an isolated existence than it tells us about the local groups who used it.”
The suggestion therefore is that Rouse’s system obscures as much as it reveals,
and that “we need to adopt a more complex view of the region’s culture
history.”
4. In his presentation to IACA in 1999, Keegan widened his attack on
Rouse’s series concept, since, he considered, its use and abuse served only
to mask significant internal variability in the units concerned. “Lumping
decorative motifs into broad series categories tells us nothing about
the processes that operated to produce (them) or about the reasons these
modes were used and maintained” (Keegan 2001:237). Hence, he concluded
with an admonition: “Avoid the oid.”
More recently, Keegan has concentrated his fire upon the nature of the Saladoid
expansion into the West Indies, and has presented an alternative scheme
whereby the Ostionoid “people and culture” may have derived not from the