c. 2000 BCE to 100 CE · Indigenousspan
Anguilla's cliff top workshop turned queen conch into axes
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Whitehead's Bluff stands on a karst plateau on Anguilla, eleven to fourteen metres above the sea and fully exposed to the northeastern trade winds. It is uncomfortable ground. What it offered was access. The rocky shore of Windward Point Bay lies about three hundred metres away, and the people living there built an economy on molluscs and a short list of other resources within easy reach. Excavation recovered finished shell celts along with the preforms they were cut from, all worked out of Lobatus gigas, the queen conch. Blanks and finished pieces together mean production happened on the spot. The place was a workshop supplying cutting tools to an island with no volcanic stone to make them from. Across the northern Lesser Antilles, Archaic Age communities each solved the same problem with whatever their own island held, and on Anguilla the answer was the conch.
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