Handbook of Ceramic Animal Symbols in the Ancient Lesser Antilles (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series)

The importance of animals as surrogates and signifiers in pre-Columbian art places them at the foundation of symbolic language and visual culture throughout much of the ancient Americas. However, with no comprehensive iconographic study of the ceramics of the Lesser Antilles, it has fallen to archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and art historians to independently decipher the many species and symbols as they seek interpretations of visual culture in the archaeological record.

In this volume, Lawrence Waldron surveys zoomorphic iconography from over twenty major international collections, focusing on the cultural significance of nearly two dozen representations found in Saladoidera ceramics. He provides criteria for systematically identifying each recognizable species and then explores the modeled and painted imagery of terrestrial and aquatic mammals, bats, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Each chapter is divided into sections dedicated to individual species, and Waldron explores the traditional narratives and other folk traditions associated with the species, as well as the frequency with which the representations of the species appear across the Caribbean. He also tracks the iconographic and stylistic differences between the various islands, cross-referencing these differences with ethnographic accounts of regional cohesion, schism, and migration among South American populations. Waldron shows how these regional disparities may have been politically savvy expressions of cultural distinctions among emergent Caribbean subgroups. Unique iconographic interests and emphases, especially in the imagery of owls and some aquatic species, suggest that sociopolitical, spiritual, and iconological differences may have even motivated migration into the Caribbean islands after which these differences were stressed and elaborated as aspects of new regional identities.