COMMENT ON BOOK REVIEW

Extract

In reading the recent LAQ review of my 2016 work, Handbook of Ceramic Animal Symbols in the Ancient Lesser Antilles (Roosevelt, review of Waldron, Latin American Antiquity 29:413–414), I was reminded how neglectful my own profession of precolumbian art history has been of ancient Antillean studies. Recognizing this important lacuna in the research, the University Press of Florida approached me with the possibility of writing two books on precolumbian Caribbean art. As pioneering works in this area, these books will be read by scholars mostly outside this area. They are bound to run afoul of readers who might think zoic (for formless animal spirits) is merely an overwrought version of zoomorphic (for physical representations of them), realistic means the same as mimetic or naturalistic, and trigonal ought to carry a meaning derived from geology rather than biology (e.g., trigonal clam shells) or the standard dictionary definition (i.e., “triangular in cross section”). Just two complaints in the LAQ review about my term usage could improve the book. Several times I used the word endemic instead of native inappropriately, and the word rectilinear should have been used more often than the vaguer geometric. The rest is quibbling. For example, my use of the term Amazonid (used similarly by preeminent Caribbean archaeologist Irving Rouse) to describe the culture of both Antilleans and Amazonians, is consistent with my insistence throughout the book that Antillean cultures, while partially derived from Amazonian ones, are not themselves Amazonian.