KITCHEN MIDDENS OF JAMAICA 



301 



nected with the rehgious rites of the 

 Arawak. Like many prehistoric tribes, 

 the Arawak had good and bad deities 

 which they worshipped. They had in 

 fact, it is known, several goddesses to 

 whom homage was paid, and offerings 

 were made at certain seasons of the year, 

 and on certain festivals. These cere- 

 monies were conducted by the shamans, 

 who were both priests and medicine men. 

 The deities generally were represented by 

 zemes, small stone or wooden idols, the 

 former often in the shape of amulets 

 which were worn around the neck, sus- 

 pended from a cord. Various animals 

 were also worshipped, the snake on Haiti 

 and Porto Rico, the turtle and the parrot 

 on Jamaica, and the monkey on the more 

 southern islands. 



Among the objects made by working 

 stone, fall also the pendant ornaments. 

 These have been fashioned with consid- 

 erable skill and certainly with great 

 patience, when one takes into account 

 that the Arawak had no metal tool to 

 work with, but laboriously fashioned the 

 pendants with the aid of sand, stone and 

 an incredible amount of rubbing. The 

 hole in the pendants is often so small 

 that it makes one wonder how the Ara- 

 wak could have drilled it with the rude 

 tools they had. 



Pottery is perhaps the most important 

 class of Arawak relics, because the forms 

 of their vessels and the kind of designs 

 used in decorating them show the artis- 

 tic status of these ancient people. They 

 used a great deal of pottery in cooking 

 their food over wood fires. The evidence 

 of this is seen in the external smoked and 

 blackened portions of vessels discovered. 

 The pottery is fragmentary, as is always 

 the case in these middens. Entire ob- 

 jects of terra cotta from the West Indies 

 are extremely rare, having been found 

 only occasionally in caves, where they 

 were put with the remains of the dead, 





Cylindrical stone pendant of the Arawak such 

 as is worn to-day by chiefs of tribes in the north- 

 ern part of South America. Such pendants were 

 fashioned with the aid of sand and stone and an 

 incredible amount of rubbing 



