Istwa Nou

Boca Chica vessels are thick walled, sturdy and finished to a fine polish, and their shapes are ambitious: boat shaped bowls, spherical bottles, forms that take skill to build and to fire without cracking. In the Dominican Republic the bottles are known as potizas and were used for carrying water and for manioc beer. The decoration runs in wide incised bands, and the modelled lugs above the rim often take the form of a bat's face. The style takes its name from a site in the Dominican Republic and turns up across Puerto Rico as well, which is why it counts as a major component of Late Ceramic Age material culture rather than a local fashion. Objects like these are what the word Taíno actually rests on. A set of shared icons, made to a shared standard and distributed across the northern Caribbean, tells you that communities on different islands recognised the same images and wanted to own the things carrying them.

Boca Chica pottery and the Chicoid designs that go with it reach well beyond Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, appearing in the Lesser Antilles to the east and in Cuba to the west. Establishing the distribution is the easy part. The harder question is how a complicated set of images moved that far and what it meant to the people who took it up. A motif does not travel by itself. Somebody carried a pot, or learned a technique from a potter on another island, or wanted an object that marked them as connected to a place with standing. Whether the communities adopting these designs understood them as their makers did is beyond recovery, and it is worth admitting as much. What the spread does establish is heavy traffic between islands and a shared regional prestige in which certain material traditions were worth acquiring. Indigenous boundaries in the Caribbean were fluid, and objects crossed them faster than anything else.