Caribbean (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (537 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, storm surges from Hurricane Maria exposed evidence of an early European colonial settlement on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. Subsequent survey and testing established the site as a trading settlement, dating from the sixteenth until eighteenth century, a period of dynamic change in the Caribbean. The site is located on the coastline of an...
Archaeology of Mercantilism: An Analysis of Vessels and Passengers in Puerto Rico, 1510-1545 (2016)
This paper presents the preliminary findings of a research project that uses the registries of vessels(Relación de Navíos) from the Royal Treasury of Puerto Rico to study the quantity of people that arrived to the island during the first half of the 16th century, at the height of the Spanish colonization. The main objective of this research is to quantify the passengers and vessels that arrived at the two main ports in Puerto Rico: San Juan and San Germán. The incorporation of this documentary...
Archaeology of Resistance? Barbuda in the Aftermath of Hurricane Irma (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Barbuda, a small island in the Lesser Antilles, was directly hit by mega storm, Hurricane Irma, in September of 2017. 90-95% of the modern structures were either completely destroyed or lost their roofs, windows and doors. Additionally, there was tremendous loss to both intangible cultural heritage and heritage sites. Erosion in coastal areas decimated more...
The Archaeology of the Archaic Age on Margarita Island within the Context of the Venezuelan Caribbean (2016)
Since the 1950s, the archaeology of Margarita, the largest island of Venezuela, has been neglected leaving open an important lacunae in the current knowledge of Venezuelan and Caribbean archaeology. In 2008, human bones were accidentally unearthed on the island, allowing the recovery of two individuals and associated cultural materials that included lithics, shells, and red ochre. The archaeological layer and human bones date to between 4,090 and 2,160 BP. The osteological analyses show...
Archaeozoology contributions to the studies of the anthropology of food through the study of two archaeological contexts of early Hispanic – Indigenous interaction in the northeast of Cuban. (2016)
The study of bone modifications in archaeology becomes an important source of information for understanding aspects of food anthropology and extinct human groups, as well as it improves the knowledge of these aspects in poorly documented historical stages. This applies to the first moments of Spanish colonization in the north of Holguin. This paper includes elements of the exploitation of faunal resources in two marked Indo-Hispanic archaeological contexts in northeastern Cuba: Chorro de Maita...
Archaic Age Bahamas? New perspectives from Long Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has long been assumed that the Bahamas were colonized by Ceramic Age peoples who began their expansion into the Caribbean islands from northeastern South America about 500 BC. The widespread occurrence of pottery in the Bahamas (Palmetto Ware), and the timing of initial ‘Lucayan" settlement in the Bahamas is dated to AD 700-800 ...
Archaic Age migration and settlement on Aruba (2016)
Archaic Age migration and settlement on Aruba The Archaic Period of Aruba falls between 2500 BC to 900/1000AD and is characterized by nomadic ‘fisher-hunter-gatherers’ with a predominantly marine, coastal orientation, occupying different areas of the island. Their diet consisted mostly out of marine food and to a lesser extent hunting of small game and foraging. The majority of the so-called preceramic sites are coastal shell-middens predominantly located on limestone. The sites of Canashito and...
Archaic Age voyaging, networks and resource mobility around the Caribbean Sea (2016)
This paper builds on the idea that Caribbean Archaic Age communities were highly mobile and connected. Study of fisher-collector sites in the Northeastern and Southern Caribbean has shown that Archaic Age communities managed extensive subsistence/ resource/activity systems, involving intra-archipelagic and mainland-island voyaging. The connectivity patterns and resource landscapes of these two regions will be discussed. We see a set of vital resources, which would remain important for later...
Archaic Era Vertebrate Faunal Remains from Cuba (2016)
The broad patterns of Archaic or pre-ceramic subsistence adaptations are not well known for the broader Caribbean region partly due to the ecological variability among the islands and limited quantified faunal data from sites of appropriate age. The state of knowledge for Cuba is hampered by a limited number of radiocarbon dated archaeological sites. In this paper we present quantified vertebrate faunal data and radiocarbon dates from three Cuban sites, Las Obas, Vega del Palmar, and Los...
Archeology and Public Education: Uncovering the Stories of the Virgin Islands National Park (2016)
The Virgin Islands National Park encompasses over half of the island of St. John hundreds of acres of submerged lands, and most of Hassel Island located in the harbor of St. Thomas. Within the park's boundaries are prehistoric sites along every beach, and hundreds of historic structures that make up a complex landscape of archaeological sites that date from the 840 BCE through the 19th century. Sites include over a hundred plantations, fortifications, epidemic hospitals, battlefields, and...
Arm Chair Archaeology: GIS-ing the 1733 St. Jan Slave Rebellion (2017)
The 1733 St. Jan Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies was an ephemeral event, from an archaeological perspective. Lasting only 8 months and diffused across the 20-sq mile island, the rebellion lacks a traditional archaeological signature even from battlefield methodologies. However, it is useful to apply archaeological questions to topics that are difficult to approach through dirt and shovel. This paper will discuss the application of GIS methods to analyze the slave rebellion from...
Armchair Archaeothanatology: Post-Excavation Archaeothanatology in the Caribbean (2015)
Archaeothanatology is increasingly important in the study of mortuary practices, as it allows us to study aspects of mortuary behaviour that were traditionally hard to assess. However, the archaeothanatological approach entails a detailed and very time-consuming excavation and documentation methodology that requires thorough training. Increasingly refined excavation and documentation methods have clear advantages for our understanding of the mortuary record, but there is a danger of rendering...
Arqueología para reivindicar: Huellas de africanía en la producción alfarera de Cartagena de Indias (S. XVI-XVIII) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Afro-Latin American Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde el inicio de la trata transatlántica las poblaciones africanas y sus descendientes en América fueron inferiorizados e invisilizados en múltiples aspectos. El sometimiento y esclavización de estas mujeres, hombres, niñas y niños, pretendía despojarlos de su humanidad y convertirlos en bienes útiles. Sin embargo, nunca dejaron de ser personas ni...
Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500-1800, Volume 1: Ceramics and Glassware (1987)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500-1800, Volume I: Ceramics, Glassware, and Beads (1987)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Assessing Local Variability and Storm Impacts in Coastal Paleoenvironment Models (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Re-Visualizing Submerged Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Developing accurate reconstructions of changes in coastal geomorphology is critical to understanding how past sea-level rise inundated landscapes and influenced human activities. Previous approaches to coastal reconstructions have often been limited to “bathtub” reconstructions that use regional or global eustatic sea-level curve values to...
Assessing Threats to Coastal Sites: A Trial Run on St Croix, USVI (2018)
The International Association for Caribbean Archaeology's Endangered Sites Task Force is concerned about the threat to coastal sites by rising sea levels. In March 2017, a small team of Mercer University non-archaeology students participated in a project on ST Croix, USVI, to determine how local populations could best provide measurable information to professional archaeologists and cultural resource managers. The five-day project assessed ten sites assigned by the USVI Territorial...
At the Edge: Jamaican Amerindians and the Colonial Encounter. (2015)
This paper presents a new study of archaeological sites, collections and historical documents to bring to light a poorly known chapter in the Caribbean colonial encounters: the interactions of Jamaican Amerindians with the Spanish, and later British and Maroons. The island of Jamaica held a special position in the Spanish colonial empire, due to its peripheral position in in the global shipping and trade networks that emerged in the early Spanish main and a lack of the precious metals that were...
At the Intersection: Destabilizing White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Century Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies (2017)
Guided by contemporary humoral theory, 18th-century Europeans believed climate and bodily humors to be mutually influential and correlated in their effect on human temperament, appearance, and behavior. Resettlement to a new climate was understood to create humoral imbalances fundamentally affecting an individual’s character and even physical appearance including skin color. Subject to the effects of tropical climate British settlers to the West Indies thus transformed were viewed as...
Avian Remains from the Late Pre-colonial Amerindian Sites on the Islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean (2016)
Abstract This paper presents the results of the analyses of an assemblage of over 3,000 bird remains systematically recovered in various late pre-Hispanic sites (c. AD 1000–1500) on the islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean. We discuss possible signatures of seasonal occupancy of the island campsites as inferred from the bio-ecology of the identified bird specimens. The data indicates that several families of birds were persistently targeted by Amerindians for food and/or feathers, and their bones...
"Back to the Soil": Community Archaeology and Heritage Tourism in Eleuthera, Bahamas (2016)
Over the past several decades there has been a great deal of archaeological excavation and analysis of both U.S. and Caribbean plantations. However, many of these research projects are designed to address archaeological research questions rather than some of the pressing problems faced by descendant communities concerning their heritage. In 1994, UNESCO launched their “Slave Route” project, with the aim of “contributing to a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation, issues and...
Bajan Metallurgy: An Archival Exploration Of Local Blacksmithing, 1600-1800s (2023)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In recent years, Trent’s Cave, located on Trents Plantation (St. James Parish, Barbados), has served as a site of personal interest due to the collection of iron and steel artifacts recovered from the cavern and surrounding area. Typically, when exploring the earliest industries found in Barbados from the 1600-1800s, rarely is the attention placed on the nature of metallurgy, or where...
Bayamanaco and the Cayman: The Mythic origin of Manioc Cultivation, Amazonia-Antilles (2017)
Recent trace analysis of Greater Antillean culinary implements finds a paucity of evidence for manioc until late times. This is anomalous since it was believed that manioc accompanied the first truly horticultural and ceramic-producing groups, the Saladoids, from the Orinocan lowlands of South America through the Lesser Antilles to Puerto Rico at 800-500 B.C. Such late occurrence also contradicts the fact that manioc is a lowland cultigen, spanning northern tropical South America. Actual tubers...
A Bayesian model sensitivity study of non-static diet-collagen isotope fractionations factors used to assess breastfeeding and weaning practices among fisher-gatherers populations, western Cuba (2017)
Reconstructing paleo-diets from bone-collagen isotope values (carbon and nitrogen) requires proper knowledge of diet-collagen isotopic fractionations (∆d13Cdiet-col, ∆d15Ndiet-col). While these isotopic fractionations vary considerably among previous human paleo-diet reconstructions, some more recent studies have successfully employed "non-static" dietary offsets. New research suggests that non-static diet-collagen isotope fractionations is best when attempting to reconstruct paleo-diets of...
Bayesian probability weaning age estimates of sub-adults from Canimar Abajo, Cuba (2015)
Bone collagen from thirty-two sub-adults (between 0 and 5 years old) and eighteen adult females, excavated from two cemeteries at Canimar Abajo, Cuba (occupied between 1130±110 BCE and 580±120 CE) were analyzed for carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions and then used in two open source Bayesian probability mixing models (Stable Isotope analysis in R, SIAR; Weaning Age Reconstruction with Nitrogen isotopes, WARN) to estimate weaning ages. The weaning age estimates are complimentary between the...