available foods, but Dominican archaeologists doubt that this happened. Other investigators have focused upon individual valleys or stretches of coast in order to be able to examine the distribution of settlements in greater detail. The work of Rodríguez (1990) in the Loíza Valley, the largest valley in Puerto Rico, is a good example.

There has also been considerable interest in religion and art, the former because it permeated so many aspects of the Tainos’ culture and the latter because of the Tainos’ propensity to portray deities in their art. Columbus commissioned Ramón Pané, a friar who accompanied him on his second voyage, to make a study of Taino religion. Pané spent four years in northern Hispaniola, learning the Tainos’ language, observing their rituals, and listening to their songs and stories, and then submitted a relatively detailed report to Columbus (Arrom 1988). His work has been called the first anthropological research in the New World, and its results have been widely used to draw conclusions about religious practices and beliefs from the archaeological remains of the Tainos and their direct ancestors (e.g., Arrom 1989). Most recently, Roe (1994) has broken new ground by undertaking a componential analysis of ceramic- and formative-age art.

Much has been done, too, to identify items of long-distance trade and to determine their sources. Students of this activity have learned that the Saladoid migrants remained in contact with their ancestors in South America for some time after they entered the West Indies but broke that contact off shortly after the time of Christ (Rouse 1992, 85). The Ostionoids resumed contact ca. a.d. 1200, concomitant with the rise of chiefdoms. There was extensive commerce in ornaments of precious stones along the coasts and rivers of the South American mainland and out into the West Indies during both periods (Boomert 1987; Lathrap 1973). In addition, we now have evidence that cast gold-copper ornaments were traded into the West Indies from northern South America during Saladoid as well as late Ostionoid (i.e., Taino) times (Siegel and Severin 1993). Only sheet-gold ornaments were produced in the islands, where that metal was a sign of rank among the Tainos.

In the absence of adequate evidence about other forms of contact between the local societies, such as intermarriage, play, politics, and warfare, Caribbeanists have subsumed all such activities with trade under the heading of interaction. The Caribbean culture area is a particularly good place to study this process because the Orinoco Valley and the islands of the West Indies proper form a linear sequence connected by the river’s strong flow and by the fact that almost all of the islands are within sight of each other. Consequently, the local archaeology provides a wealth of information about the effect of geographical factors on the process of interaction.

Caribbeanists have sought to identify interaction spheres in the Orinoco Valley and the West Indies by studying the similarities in culture among local areas. Rouse (1992, 84–85) has concluded that the land surrounding the Gulf of Paria, including the Barrancas area just above the Orinoco delta, northwestern Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago Islands, comprised such a sphere during the first half of the first millennium a.d. It was characterized by the Barrancoid ceramic series, whose influence extended as far upstream as the first rapids in the upper middle part of the Orinoco Valley and as far out into the West Indies as Antigua in the center of the Lesser Antilles (Barse 1989).

When I constructed my chronological charts for the Greater Antilles, I arranged their columns in order of the distribution of the ceramic- and formative-age cultures and then found, to my surprise, that the lithic- and archaic-age cultures had interrupted distributions (Fig. 2). Seeking a reason for this discrepancy, I found that I had grouped together the columns on either side of the passages between islands because they constituted separate “passage areas” during the ceramic and formative ages. If I had instead arranged the columns island by island, the local cultures of the lithic, archaic, and historic ages would all have had continuous distributions because each island comprised a culturally homogenous area during those ages. (The present division of the island of Hispaniola