440 FEWKES: PREHISTORIC CULTURAL CENTERS 



islands may have been made by a people inhabiting them before 

 the Caribs came. Moreover, this interpretation does not give 

 sufficient weight to the evidence furnished by the implements 

 themselves, for they imply a culture quite different from that 

 of the Caribs as made known by historical accounts, as flourish- 

 ing at an earlier date on the Carib islands. In other words, 

 there is good evidence of a prehistoric race inhabiting the Lesser 

 Antilles before the arrival of the Europeans. 



One characteristic of the prehistoric objects found on the 

 islands inhabited by Caribs when discovered may be mentioned 

 in this connection. It is well known that the Arawak, like all 

 agricultural peoples, are great potters, and that the ancient 

 Caribs, like nomads, from necessity were not. The two races 

 probably preserved these characteristics in the West Indies; 

 and the fact that we find pottery objects of high excellence on 

 all the islands inhabited by the Caribs leads to the natural in- 

 ference that they were made by a people allied to the Arawak 

 who anciently lived on these same islands. 



Archaeological remains left by the aborigines of the West 

 Indies reveal three cultural epochs, grading into each other, 

 which may indicate a sequence in time or distinct cultural stages. 

 These epochs were the cave dwellers, the agriculturalists, and 

 the Caribs. The most primitive culture is represented by ob- 

 jects found in the floors of caves or in the numerous shellheaps 

 scattered from Cuba to Trinidad. A second stage is more ad- 

 vanced and is agricultural in nature, represented on all the 

 islands but surviving at the time of discovery on the larger — 

 Cuba, Hayti, and Porto Rico; while the third, or Carib stage, 

 had replaced the agricultural in certain of the Lesser Antilles, 

 especially on the chain of volcanic islands extending from Guade- 

 loupe to Grenada. 



Although the three stages above mentioned are supposed to 

 follow each other chronologically, not one of them had com- 

 pletely died out when Columbus discovefed America. The 

 cave dwellers still survived in western Cuba and in Hayti, and 

 according to some authorities they spoke a characteristic Ian- 



