Abstract
The widespread presence of raw materials suitable for the production of stone tools on the south-eastern part of La Désirade, a small island east of Guadeloupe (French West Indies), is an interesting feature as these materials cannot be obtained on most of the neighbouring limestone islands. Small amounts of lithic off-site material have been found all over the south-eastern part of La Désirade, indicating that this area was incidentally used for the exploitation of local raw materials for the production of lithic artefacts. Concentrated and repeated activity, related to the exploitation of La Désirade chert, took place at four lithic workshops.
 This paper aims to reconstruct social and economic patterns, which may shed a light on prehistoric Amerindian territoriality and mobility, based on the exploitation and distribution of this local raw material. An inventory was made of sites where La Désirade chert was exploited and worked and of sites where this material showed up in the form of worked items.
 The La Désirade chert has been found in several prehistoric site assemblages outside La Désirade itself. However, it turns out to have a very restricted distribution, not exceeding 30 km distances from the raw material occurrences. The authors concluded that exploiting these sources may have been embedded in the general procurement strategy of the seafaring communities involved and that the observed distribution may demonstrate the extent of the territory of closely related communities that exploited a similar catchment area.
Highlights
The study of raw material acquisition, lithic reduction and the distribution and exchange of stone materials and artefacts has received an increasing attention during the past two decades in Caribbean archaeology (Bérard 2004: 159-179; García-Casco et al 2013; Harlow et al 2006; Knippenberg 2006; 2011a; Rodríguez Ramos 2001; 2010: 88-144; Queffelec et al 2018; Schertl et al 2018)
The lithic workshops themselves have not been dated so far, it is possible to provide some deductive dating by looking at dated contexts of La Désirade raw materials that have been discovered in other sites
The above presented evidence shows that red radiolarian chert from La Désirade was minimally used by people living at this island and at neighbouring islands, all through the Ceramic Age (500 BCE - CE 1493)
Summary
The study of raw material acquisition, lithic reduction and the distribution and exchange of stone materials and artefacts has received an increasing attention during the past two decades in Caribbean archaeology (Bérard 2004: 159-179; García-Casco et al 2013; Harlow et al 2006; Knippenberg 2006; 2011a; Rodríguez Ramos 2001; 2010: 88-144; Queffelec et al 2018; Schertl et al 2018). The oldest northeastern Unit has pillowed metabasalts interbedded with radiolarian chert (Montgomery et al 1992) This unusual composition, being partially magmatic and partially sedimentary with some rocks having undergone metamorphism, provided a unique possibility for prehistoric inhabitants on Grande-Terre and Guadeloupe’s surrounding calcareous islands, an area otherwise devoid of suitable rocks for the manufacture of hard stone tools, to exploit several lithic raw materials, including cherts, magmatic and metamorphic rocks (Knippenberg 2006: 151-222; de Waal 2006: 58-59). Apart from (meta-)igneous rocks the magmatic basement contains significant chert beds These cherts surface within the eastern end of the island, along the southern and eastern shores (Figure 2). This paper focuses on the exploitation and use of La Désirade chert by prehistoric Amerindian groups (who frequented this region roughly between 1500 BCE and CE 1493), in order to identify social and economic territoriality and mobility patterns
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