Ideographic expression in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean

The Taino Indians of the Greater Antilles left behind a large body of artifacts attesting to a way of life and belief which today, after much scholarly research, is not yet well understood. This dissertation represents an effort to view the iconography of these Precolumbian Indians as ideographic expression with the hope that a fresh viewpoint might add something more to accumulated archaeological and ethnohistoric information about a way of life and a process of political development that disappeared shortly after the arrival of Columbus in the West Indies in 1492.; The corpus of Taino artifacts, skillfully made and elaborately decorated, suggests a deep concern with human and animal fertility and well-being. The iconography carries a powerful sense of shamanic interaction with another world and with the human and animal creatures of this one. The creatures and powers of earth, sea, and sky are pervasively symbolized and invoked. The nature of many ceremonial artifacts suggests that ritually employed shamanic hallucinogenic experience played a large part in the lives of all the Indians of the Caribbean, and that their everyday life was a constant interaction between their beliefs and the perceived supernatural elements of the world around them. It seems evident, too, that shamanic leadership sought control and power through demonstration of access to ancestors and gods.; Much of this study is devoted to seeking the origins and understanding the messages of the motifs recorded by Taino ideography. The ancestral Saladoid people have been shown archaeologically to have come from riverine and coastal areas of South America. Many Taino notions of the use of iconography and ritual behavior to achieve and maintain power must have been brought from the mainland in the early years of the Saladoid/Arawak migration, but it also seems evident from design and motif commonalities that there was continuing, although probably minimal, contact with the mainland.; Perhaps the most meaningful conclusion here is that much can still be learned from a methodical study of iconographic data, ideographic expression, and comparative mythology. These contain a reservoir of information which existing scholarship and this dissertation have just begun to explore.