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A pottery style moves down the Orinoco and remakes who lives on the coast

c. 1500 BCE · approximate · Indigenous

2,000 to 1,001 BCEGinen1 source
c. 1500 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

A pottery style moves down the Orinoco and remakes who lives on the coast

Rouse traces the Cedrosan Saladoid, ancestors of the first Caribbean farmers, to this displacement.

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Around 1500 BCE a distinct ceramic tradition, which archaeologists call the Barrancoid series, developed in the middle and lower stretches of the Orinoco valley in what is now Venezuela. Over time its makers moved downriver toward the coast. The people already holding that ground, the communities Rouse files under the Saladero heading, were pushed out of their positions along the river, and out of that disturbance came the subseries he named Cedrosan Saladoid. This is upstream bookkeeping that matters a great deal for Haiti. The Cedrosan Saladoid are the people who a thousand years later carried farming, pottery and village life out of South America and into the Antilles, island by island, until they reached Hispaniola. The population Columbus met in 1492 descended from them. So the chain that ends in the Taino villages of the north coast begins with a pottery style shifting position on a South American river three thousand years earlier.

Barrancoid pottersCedrosan Saladoid Orinoco valleyVenezuelaAntillesHispaniola
Where this comes from Rouse, I. (1992). The Tainos: rise and decline of the people who greeted Columbus. Yale University Press. pp. 75, 77.
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