Abstract
The present paper examines bodily ornaments made of semiprecious lithic materials from the site of Pearls on the island of Grenada. The site was an important node in long-distance interaction networks at play between circum-Caribbean communities during the first centuries of the Common Era. Pearls was an amethyst bead-making workshop and a gateway to South America, from where certain lapidary raw materials likely originated. The importance of the site for regional archaeology and local stakeholders cannot be overstated. However, it has undergone severe destruction and looting over the decades. Here, we present a study of a private collection of ornaments from Pearls, which combines raw material identification, typo-technological analysis and microwear analysis. We identify great diversity in lithologies and in techniques adapted to their working properties. Multiple abrasive techniques for sawing, grinding, polishing and carving are identified. Furthermore, the use of ornaments is examined for the first time. Finally, we contrast our dataset to other Antillean sites and propose management patterns for each raw material. Our approach ultimately provides new insights on ornament making at Pearls and on its role in regional networks.
Highlights
Ornaments have been regarded as proxies for the existence of large-scale exchange networks connecting the eastern Caribbean islands with northern South America, the IsthmoColombian region and Mesoamerica (Fig. 1a) (Cody 1993; Hofman et al 2007, 2014a; Rodríguez López 1993; Rodríguez Ramos 2010; Watters 1997)
In the first centuries of the Common Era, lithic materials used as ornaments were extremely varied and unequally distributed across the circumCaribbean (Chanlatte Baik 1983; Hofman et al 2007; Murphy et al 2000; Watters and Scaglion 1994)
The collection is comparable with those retrieved from other sites of the Early Ceramic Age period, notably large and with great variety of ornament materials and types
Summary
Ornaments have been regarded as proxies for the existence of large-scale exchange networks connecting the eastern Caribbean islands with northern South America, the IsthmoColombian region and Mesoamerica (Fig. 1a) (Cody 1993; Hofman et al 2007, 2014a; Rodríguez López 1993; Rodríguez Ramos 2010; Watters 1997). The Pearls archaeological site, on the southeastern Caribbean island of Grenada (− 61°36′51.78′′ W 12°8′ 39.45′′ N1; Fig. 1b), was a key node in the exchange networks connecting the Antilles with northern South America (Cody 1993; Boomert 2007; Hofman et al 2007; Laffoon et al 2014).
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