Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

Frameworks for Caribbean Prehistory / 41
Saladoid but rather from the preceding Archaic communities (Keegan 2004,
2006). If so, the thick black line on Rouse’s chronological chart (Figure 5)
would dissolve away, at least in places.
With regard to the nature of the Saladoid expansion, Keegan suggests that it
may not necessarily have taken the form of “ island- hopping” through the Lesser
Antilles from Trinidad and Grenada onward. By boat there could have been a
“direct jump” from the South American mainland to Puerto Rico. Certainly
until we have better dates from the Windward islands this scenario cannot be
ruled out, though whether all prehistorians would wish to assume “chaos” as
their guiding principle is another matter.
As already mentioned, one of the “jogs” on Rouse’s chronological chart (Figure
5) is at “frontier 3” where the Saladoid advance supposedly halted between
200 b.c. and a.d. 600. When the advance resumed, what was Saladoid had become
Ostionoid, by default in Puerto Rico. This scenario is now challenged
by Keegan, on the grounds that the Archaic peoples themselves took the initiative
and became pottery makers. The evidence for this comes mainly from
Cuba, but the contention is that Ostionoid pottery as such probably developed
in Hispaniola. As Keegan puts it, a “progressive” development of this sort is
more likely than the emergence of a new style by way of a “degeneration” from
the Saladoid standard. “The Saladoids were never able to establish more than
a foothold in Hispaniola, and eventually the Archaic peoples who had prevented
their westward expansion . . . [expanded eastwards and] . . . the Saladoid
system of representation collapsed” (Keegan 2006:7).
This alternative scenario will surely give rise to a debate, which Keegan’s argument
is no doubt intended to stimulate. Whatever the outcome, it should
be noted that the situation in Jamaica is unaffected, since by Keegan’s own admission
the Ostionoids (or bearers of the “Redware culture”) were the first to
arrive there— wherever they came from— a “happenstance” occurrence as he
puts it (Keegan 2004:43). He also emphasizes that, in his view, the “Ostionan
and Meillacan peoples in Jamaica exhibit completely different characteristics,
which suggest that they were two entirely different cultures.”
Rouse himself would hardly have disagreed with reasoning of that nature,
but the truth is that the general thrust of the arguments Keegan and others have
advanced has been corrosive of the entire underpinning of the Rouse system.
Rouse’s framework may be one that he and others, however reluctantly, still
use, but one has a sense that a turning point has in fact already been reached.
As he said in the first of his three articles for the Journal of Archaeological Research,
“Caribbeanists have finally stopped digging ‘telephone booths’ in mid-