Source to sink in precolonial Jamaica: Tracing geochemistry and mineralogy from the rocks to the pots in understanding White Marl pottery production and exchange

Abstract

White Marl is the largest, most intensively inhabited late-precolonial site documented to date for Jamaica. Its size and structural organization suggests that it functioned as a major sociopolitical/economic hub among the increasingly complex chiefdoms in the Greater Antilles. The White Marl artifact assemblage is dominated by massive quantities of ceramics. To address the origin(s) of materials from which White Marl pottery was produced, geochemical and petrographic analyses were conducted on samples of ceramics and nearby sediments. Geochemical and petrographic data were used to constrain the provenance of the pottery using a source-to-sink model. We show that the sediments in the Rio Cobre adjacent to the site originated from the nearby Above Rocks Inlier and that most of the pottery was sourced from these sediments (two geochemical pottery groups). A third pottery group has a distinctive geochemistry from a location outside of the Rio Cobre drainage. Thin sections demonstrate that a recipe of 60% clay and 40% temper was consistently followed in pottery manufacture. Multielement plots are used to distinguish sources and principal component analyses to characterize and link sediments to pottery groups. Integrating geochemical and petrographic analyses of raw sediment and pottery samples in a source-to-sink framework is a powerful way to reconstruct ceramic production strategies and trade-and-exchange networks.