The Caribbean Sea is synonymous with maritime travel due to it's 7,000-year history of human habitation. The Indigenous Arawakans of the Caribbean use the term kana:wa to describe their vessels.
The task of reconstructing ancient trade routes relies on subtle clues locked away in the archaeological record. The Florida Museum of Natural History used pottery to look at the history of navigation in the Caribbean.
"Our methods mark a big improvement over other studies that mostly look at a single site or single island, where you might see differences but not know what it means because you're looking at the results in isolation," said co-author Lindsay Bloch.
The Caribbean islands have been home to people for more than 7,000 years. New groups from Venezuela established a trading network among islands, which they used to exchange food, tools and jewelry. Pottery vessels are the most common artifacts that are still around today.
Emily Kracht, a collections assistant in the Ceramic Technology Lab, said that pottery is one of the most common things they find.
Different Caribbean cultures developed their own styles and techniques for making pottery over the course of thousands of years. Some artifacts are simple and unadorned, while others are decorated with incised lines and ridges.
Many studies rely on similarities in style to differentiate between cultures. This method leaves more questions than answers and excludes material that could be useful.
Most of the pottery we find in the world is not decorated. She said that it's going to be things used for cooking or storage which are usually plain and ignored because they're seen as generic.
The researchers focused on what the pottery was made of rather than looking at the different styles. The researchers used a laser to etch tiny lines into the clay used to make the pottery. More than seven decades' worth of archaeological collections were included in their analysis.
One of the advantages of analysis is that we can see where a pot was made and compare it to where it ended up.
Due to the complexity of the Caribbean's underlying geology, detailed comparisons can be made. The largest islands in the archipelago are believed to have started as an underwater plateau. After the break up of Pangaea, the Caribbean plate moved east in a series of volcanic eruptions that elevated it above sea level.
Millions of years of weathering reduced these volcanic outcrops into fine-grained clays with different concentrations of elements. The small Caribbean pottery sherd bears the signature of the region it was made in.
The results of the comparative analysis are not what you would expect. The Lucayan Islands were only used for a short time for harvesting resources, and the people who traveled to them would have sailed from the larger islands to the south to support permanent population centers.
Cuba is by far the largest island in the Caribbean and the closest to The Bahamas. The Caribbean's cultural hub was located on the northwest coast of Hispaniola, from which people imported and exported goods for hundreds of years, according to the results of the study.
Some of the pottery would have been used to ferry goods out to these islands and people would potentially carry back a variety of marine resources.
The Lucayans, or the People of the Islands, became a permanent settlement in The Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. They began making their own pottery from claylike soils deposited by African dust, but the results didn't match the pottery from Hispaniola. The poor quality of the Saharan soil causes Lucayan pottery, called Palmetto Ware, to be thick and soft.
Hispaniola was the main trading partner and exporter of pottery to the Lucayan Islands before the Spanish came to power.
The Lucayans were related to people in Hispaniola and this study shows their enduring relationship through pottery.
The Florida Museum of Natural History has a co-author.
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The Florida Museum of Natural History provides materials. Jerald Pinson wrote the original. The content can be edited for style and length.
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