Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

Environment, Fauna, and Flora / 55
Lee’s comments on the use of chert come in the article by himself and Roobol
(1976) on the petrography and source of the raw materials employed by the
Pre- Columbian inhabitants of the island. He was above all concerned with the
lithology of the petaloid celts that have always so much interested collectors in
Jamaica. He listed 456 such celts (including 22 from his own collection, which
he had sliced for microscopic study) in eight different raw material groups (including
conch shell) (Roobol and Lee 1976:Table 1). As he pointed out, 408
(89.5 percent) are of metamorphic rocks, the great majority 357 (78.3 percent)
being of greenstone. The provenance of 343 of these celts was also recorded in
terms of their occurrence in two north- coast and five south- coast parishes, the
respective totals being 144 and 199 (Roobol and Lee 1976:Table 2). The most
interesting point to emerge from this study, as he emphasized, is the fact that
the metamorphic rocks must have come from the south side of the Blue Mountain
inlier. Lee considered that in this case, too, river pebbles provided the main
source, from the lower reaches of the Morant River in particular. Since the celts
are found all over the island, the conclusion is inescapable that they were transported
from this area and that an extensive trade network existed. Relatively
speaking, the proportions of nonmetamorphic rocks are greater in the southern
parishes, suggesting that here (but not on the north coast) there were some suitable
local sources as well.
Lee’s conclusions with regard to the petaloid celts were confirmed by his
study of the other stone artifacts in his possession or known to him, in particular
10 beads and nine pendants. The beads were mostly of white chalcedony
and the pendants of clear keratophyre, that is, hydrothermally altered andesite
(Porter et al. 1982). As Lee pointed out, these materials are again found
only on the southern slopes of the Blue Mountain inlier. In addition, he noted
two pendants made of granular quartzite from Bellevue (K13) and Wallman
Town (C8). This material cannot have originated in Jamaica and indicates connections
to the South American mainland.
Fauna
A general survey of the fauna native to the Greater Antilles is provided by
Francisco Watlington (in Sued- Badillo 2003; cf. Newsom and Wing 2004). As
Watlington says, it is clear that humans “were not the first terrestrial mammals
or even the first primates to populate the islands.” At the end of the Pleistocene,
land mammals constituted an “anomalous assortment of endemic forms
evolved from ancestors that rafted from far away,” a process involving “rare ac-