Dark materials: Pre-Columbian black lithic carvings from St Vincent and the wider Caribbean

Abstract

A small number of pre-Columbian black lithic carvings are known to have been found at archaeological sites across the Caribbean, as well as in parts of neighbouring mainland South America. The identity of the material used to create these artefacts is often unknown, but suggestions include lignite, wood, petrified wood, manja(c)k, jet (or 'jet-like' materials) and hardened asphalt.These identifications are often historical and lacking any scientific basis, and as such can be unreliable. However, identification of the material has the potential to inform on the source of the carving and thereby pre-Columbian trade routes within the circum-Caribbean region. Four analytical techniques (reflectance microscopy, FTIR, Py-GC/MS, x-ray fluorescence) were applied to samples taken from two carvings found on St Vincent and five comparative materials. Both artefacts were found to be most likely to be carved from cannel coal, indicating that they originated in South American (where cannel coal is found extensively in locations in Colombia and Venezuela), as the material is not found within the Caribbean region.

Obsidian in the Caribbean Islands? Mysterious Ceramic Age glass artefacts in the Lesser Antilles.

“…Most of the lithic tools produced in the Lesser Antilles are based on good quality flint from Antigua, jasper from several islands and radiolarite from La Désirade (van Gijn 1993; Knippenberg 2007; de Waal and Knippenberg 2020; Queffelec et al 2023). Interestingly, they decided to produce some flaking products with a poor quality material, while they could have used this shiny and unique material to produce other kind of artefacts such as the diverse beads or pendants made using other hard and difficult to work stones such as rock crystal, amethyst or nephrite (Queffelec, 2022, Raymond et al 2021, including some rare black ones (Brock et al, 2020;Queffelec et al, 2020). We think that this novelty could be related to the exploration of yet uncharted areas of the islands, as Early Ceramic occupations are predominantly coastal, at least as evidenced by the archaeological record (Stouvenot and Casagrande 2017).…”