This book is a collection of previously published articles, most drawn from the author’s doctoral dissertation, about people who lived in the Bahama Islands when Christopher Columbus arrived there in 1492. The author outlines the geography of the archipelago and summarizes West Indian prehistory, speculating about the colonizing of the Bahamas by the native Lucayans. He proposes the Lucayans’ social organization, subsistence strategy, and population, primarily on the basis of surface surveys of the middle and southern islands. One chapter discusses where Columbus made his initial landfall; another, where and when the Spanish and others landed or shipwrecked in the West Indies. The book does well in presenting archaeological methodology, but on other topics it tends to emulate the theoretical tail wagging the dog. And it is fraught with technical problems.
The author clearly is unfamiliar with the Spanish language. All references to sixteenth-century literature, while in themselves perhaps credible, are secondary or even tertiary: Sauer, Loven (sic), Craton, even Michener(!). The only apparent firsthand account is discounted because there is “no reason to accept” its veracity; neither references nor reasons are provided. Many words lack accent marks: Marien, Martin Alonso Pinzon, Velasquez Cuellar, even arqueologia. The term commonly assumed is used with no supporting references; a map to show the location of Arawak and Ciboney shows neither; the plural pronoun we has not been expunged from a chapter that was published previously under joint authorship.
The book simply does not give enough information to form the “conclusions” it presents. Drawing much of a data base from surface surveys is obviously not a practical approach in beach-building geological environments. Intensive work has been carried out on only two islands in the entire archipelago: San Salvador and Middle Caicos. Yet the former is excluded entirely from the author’s substantive base because information “was not available,” which is simply not true! Also excluded: results of excavations on Samana, Crooked Island, New Providence, and Grand Bahama. The huge Pigeon Creek site on San Salvador, perhaps the largest known in all the Bahamas, is ignored, as are surface finds on Long Island, the Berry Islands, and Conception. No mention is made of an aceramic people already inhabiting the islands, although possible aceramic sites have been found on the central and northern islands.
Keegan classifies sites on the basis of the surface distribution of artifacts (p. 72). Using his rankings, Palmetto Grove, Long Bay, Ward, and Three Dog on San Salvador and Buttonwood on Samana would be the smallest, “allochthonous,” because surface indications amount to a potsherd or two, a distribution of less than 10 meters in length. Excavations, however, have since proven this to be in error. Such sites should be classified as “villages,” the largest of Keegan’s categories. He suggests that Lucayan populations numbered about 40,000, on the basis of “historic documents” (no citation given). The figure may have been closer to 20,000. Moreover, Keegan seems unaware that “Lucayan” is a rubric we (including this reviewer) are guilty of using, when published research suggests that at least three dialects circulated in the archipelago.
This book should be read with caution. As Keegan suggests, it is food for thought.