Procurement of beads and pendants in an early Saladoid settlement of Guadeloupe (French West Indies)

What is it about?

The preventive excavation of an archaeological site located at the Gare Maritime of Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe, French West Indies) revealed a series of stone artifacts including finished beads and pendants, as well as pieces representing several stages of the chaîne opératoire. This work is an integrated study of the mineralogy and typo-technology of these objects. The artifacts have been recovered from layers interpreted as midden deposits of an early Saladoid coastal settlement dated to 250–400 cal. A.D. Non-invasive analyses by Raman spectroscopy have shown that the 50 artifacts belong to 13 different gemstones which are, in decreasing order of frequency: serpentine, amethyst, turquoise, sudoite, rock crystal, calcite, feldspar, diorite, jasper, aventurine, chlorite, paragonite and nephrite. All these materials’ mineralogy, and in particular the great diversity of the so called “green rocks”, could only be reliably determined through an analytical characterization. The diversity of lithic materials used and abandoned in the Gare Maritime site dump is the largest known to date in the Caribbean archipelago. The presence of seven objects in turquoise is particularly noteworthy in view of its rarity in the other known sites in the region. The chaîne opératoire for each of these raw materials could be approached for the first time in the Caribbean area by emancipating ourselves from the “greenstone” category, which has been too often used in the past because of the lack of reliable mineralogical identification. These results make it possible to integrate the Gare Maritime site into the group of Saladoid sites which have delivered a large set of ornamental elements. On the one hand, the various shapes of artifacts fit the regional cultural pattern, both for beads and pendants shapes, the latter being mainly stylized frogs. On the other hand, the use of 13 semi-precious stones in the lapidary production is exceptional for the region and confirms the use at this period of many exotic raw materials. The provenance of these materials, although difficult to pinpoint properly due to the incomplete mapping of regional resources, documents a mixture of regional and even distant (continental) origins, thus strengthening the idea of a pan-Caribbean network for the exchange of raw materials for lapidary art.

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