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fax (850) 580-2884 Webmaster: John Jameson
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Winner of the National Park Service Keeper of
the Light Award
Interaction and Exchange Among Prehistoric Caribbean Societies, St. Croix , U.S. Virgin Islands (Cont'd)
Who were these people?
The early ceramic-making farmer-fishers commonly referred to as Saladoid have been
most often described as egalitarian tribes. These peoples, originally living along the middle Orinoco River of lowland
Amazonia, made fine, high-fired decorated pottery and planted gardens where they grew manioc and many kinds of fruits.
There were numerous societies and communities throughout the northeastern South America and Lowland Amazonia, and that
their travels, exchanges, and interactions were not sporadic Possibly because of competition for limited farmable land
and increasing populations, beginning sometime around ca. 1000 − 500 B.C., groups of Early Ceramic Saladoid peoples
traveled down the Orinoco, crossed the Gulf of Paria, and spread both east and west along the Venezuelan and Guayanan
coasts, continuing up to the islands of the northern Lesser Antilles and the Vieques Sound. They finally reached the
larger, environmentally diverse and sedimentary islands of the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and eastern Hispaniola
)
with ceramics used in NAA, results from NAA testing and
group membership.
Communities consisted of houses clustered around central cleared plazas, often interpreted as multifunctional areas that would have often been used for ceremonial functions, a pattern often found in many tribal societies, including those of lowland Amazonia. On St. Croix and neighboring islands, settlements were located near deep guts that, in the past, would have been reliable sources of fresh water.
)
Prosperity style, Early Saladoid. St.
Georges site. A: cat. # 2732; b: cat.
# 2724; c: cat. # 2719; d: cat. # 2723.
Folmer Anderson Collection,
Christiansted National Historic Site.
Archeologists recognize two major decorative ceramic series within Saladoid culture − Huecan and Cedrosan − in addition to daily use or utilitarian wares. Huecan subseries pottery typically consists of zone-incised and crosshatched (ZIC) (Figure 2) designs normally restricted to vessel rims and flanges, while Cedrosan pottery has fine white-on-red painting (WOR wares) (Figure 3). Both WOR and ZIC wares require skill in ceramic technology, the ability to make films and paints, and skill in the execution of designs. Because of the skill levels required for their production, it does not seem likely that these were daily use wares, but were made by at least part-time specialists for particular reasons, whether ritual, feasting events, or individual status symbols.
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