A New Prehistoric Culture in Haiti
Excavation around Fort Liberté Bay in northern Haiti produced two kinds of refuse deposit that never mix. Five sites yielded chipped scrapers, knives and stemmed blades of flint, grinding stones, notched double-headed axes and red ochre, with no pottery and no bone refuse whatever. Six other sites, several of them low mounds, held abundant pottery, polished stone and shell tools, and the bones of manatee, hutia, fish, birds and turtles, but no flint. Because pottery was made across the Antilles at the conquest, Rainey reads the flint deposits as the residue of an earlier population, and he divides the ceramic sites into a Meillac type, with boat-shaped bowls and simple modelled lugs, and a more elaborately incised Carrier type. Set against his stratified Puerto Rican sequence, where a Crab culture lies beneath a Shell culture, the Haitian material supports a three-stage scheme while leaving the relative age of the two pottery types open.
Rainey, F. G. (1936). A New Prehistoric Culture in Haiti. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 22(1), 4-8.