Working With(In) Ambiguity: Tracing Indigeneity and Diaspora through Caribbean Earthenware

This article examines the local earthenware assemblage from the La Soye archaeological complex on Dominica (Wai’tukubuli), a multi-component site including a Kalinago-operated early modern trade port. Drawing on the ceramic data from three loci, this study examines how local vessels – often categorized as Amerindian, Afro-Caribbean, or indeterminate – document continuity, adaptation, and selective technological exchange in a pluralistic Caribbean setting. Syncretic vessels found on-site include wheel-thrown wares made from local clays and European forms with Indigenous features. These artifacts demonstrate technological negotiation without signaling wholesale cultural replacement. These materials foreground ambiguity as a consistent feature of the archaeology of the early modern Caribbean, visible in the lives of those who inhabited La Soye Bay, and in the typological archaeological record. This study prioritizes everyday items to understand how people navigated plural social worlds on the colonial margins, where continuity and change were inseparable, and ambiguity was part of the ordinary.