6 BULLETIN- 15 6, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



He3^e Foundation; the American Museum of Natural History; the 

 Peabody Museum; and the United States National Museum are 

 outstanding. In the United States, Thomas Howell, of New York, 

 possesses perhaps the largest private collection of aboriginal earthen- 

 ware objects from Santo Domingo. 



In the Dominican llepublic the pottery collections of Mr. San- 

 born, of the Monte Llano Sugar Estate, Puerto Plata, and of Senor 

 Andres Socias, of Copey, Province of Monte Cristi, are extensive; 

 while the Dominican National Museum has perhaps the largest 

 collection of unbroken earthenware vessels from any one site in the 

 West Indies. Many of the examples of aboriginal ceramic wares 

 in the collections mentioned come from the Arawak Indian ceme- 

 tery at Andres, a narrow sand spit projecting into the Bahia de 

 Andres on the Caribbean near the Dominican town of Boca Chica, 

 about 25 kilometers east of the capital city of Santo Domingo, and 

 directly fronting the sugar warehouses of the Compania Azucarera 

 Boca Chica and the adjoining Dominican village of Andres. The 

 Dominican National Museum also houses the large collection for- 

 merly exhibited in the municipal building at Santiago de los Caba- 

 lleros and collected from mormer Indian village sites in the adjoin- 

 ing provinces of Santiago, Puerto Plata, and La Vega. 



The Santo Domingo pottery collection in the British Museum, 

 also smaller collections in continental museums at Berlin, Paris, 

 and Copenhagen, have been studied by Fewkes, Joyce, and others. 

 Smaller collections exist in other European museums, but the total 

 number of known examples of aboriginal earthenware from Santo 

 Domingo, considering its importance as an archeological center of 

 pottery manufacture, is small. 



Santo Domingan aboriginal pottery, as represented in the collec- 

 tions mentioned, belongs to a single culture area — form, paste, sur- 

 face finish, decorative design, and details of style set it apart as 

 distinct from Cuban, Jamaican, and to a certain extent from Porto 

 Rican aboriginal pottery wares; pottery fragments left by some 

 earlier or immigrant non-Arawak people being nonexistent in Santo 

 Domingan middens. The decorated pottery wares from every 

 known aboriginal site in Santo Domingo are unquestionably one in 

 type; that is, there is a stability in all the features making up the 

 dilFerent proportions and characters in the four primary elements of 

 ceramic material, namely, paste, surface finish, form, and design. 

 The undecorated ceramic forms from cave sites and from the moun- 

 tainous interior of Santo Domingo offer some material for con- 

 troversy as to their indentity in type with the typical Tainan or 

 Arawak ceramic wares. To offset this, however, is the deposition 

 in middens of Monte Cristi Province of similar crude, undecorated 



