Istwa Nou

At Bluefields Bay on the west coast of Jamaica, excavators recovered a working toolkit made of both stone and shell, each material used where it did the job best. The assemblage lacks the bivalve scrapers found at Sweetwater, another Jamaican site of the same period, and carries instead a high proportion of stone tools alongside shell implements for domestic work. Jamaica offers no single set of raw materials that suits every purpose, and the people at Bluefields built their kit from what their own stretch of coast and hinterland supplied. The pattern of work follows the pattern of tools. This community foraged inland and also fished the seagrass beds close in, and the kit shows both halves of that routine. Reconstructing an economy from stone and shell is slow and unglamorous work, and it is the only way to recover the daily activity of people whose names, languages and arrangements nobody who arrived later bothered to write down.

Faunal remains from Jamaican sites give an unusually clear picture of what people ate, and sea turtle dominates the deposits. At Bluefields Bay the fishing concentrated on the nearest habitats, above all the seagrass beds of the bay itself, which yielded grunts, jacks and parrotfish in quantity. Land animals supplied a smaller share, mainly hutia, a large rodent, and iguana. The mangrove swamps barely register. Either they were not yet extensive or the community left them alone, and either way the omission is the interesting part. A population eating whatever came to hand would show mangrove species in its rubbish. This one worked a few selected habitats hard and passed over others, which is a decision about labour, about what is worth the walk, and about which resources to leave standing. Read that way, a heap of bone and shell becomes a record of environmental management by people who had lived on the island long enough to know exactly what it held.

Two objects from Jamaica show how far the shared religious language of the Caribbean reached. One is an ear spool of agate, twelve millimetres across, grooved around the side and pierced through the centre, and the hole was most likely there to take coloured feathers. The other is a pendant of greenstone seven centimetres long, carved as a dog spirit, a figure that recurs across the islands. Olive shells found on the same ground, some finished and some broken part way through working, show that beads and pendants were being made on the spot rather than only brought in. The craft was local and the imagery was regional. Jamaica is often treated as a margin of the pre-Columbian Caribbean, a place things reached late. What is in the ground says otherwise. People living there were producing high status ornament themselves, in the styles and the spiritual vocabulary that ran through the whole Antillean world.

Sweetwater in Jamaica stands on a dune inside hardwood forest with swamp around it, which is not where Meillacoid people usually built. The pottery is Meillacoid throughout, mostly plain, and the few decorated pieces match the Montego Bay style found elsewhere on the island. The food remains set it apart. Where the nearby site at Paradise ate more widely, the deposit here is dominated by two bivalves, Lucina pectinata and Codakia orbicularis, animals of the muddy low oxygen ground the surrounding swamp provides. The tools follow the diet. Scrapers made from bivalve shell are the commonest implement recovered, and they are missing altogether from contemporary sites such as Bluefields Bay. So a community placed itself in difficult wet country, worked out what could be taken from it, and built the toolkit that job required. Sites a few kilometres apart on one island were living in different ways at the same moment.