Caribbean (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (597 Records)
For nearly half a millennium, Cuba served as an outpost, key to the defence of the Spanish American empire, and one of the first centres for slavery in the colonial Americas. At the same time, Cuba also served the interests of various continental and isthmian American Amerindian groups and individuals, many who, from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, journeyed to the island colony voluntarily for trade, diplomacy, and refuge. At the same time, thousands were also transported...
Initial Results of Research on the Wreck of Tank Bay 1 Possible Lyon ex Beaumont (English Harbour, Antigua & Barbuda). (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The aim of this paper is to present the results of research carried out on the wreck of Tank Bay 1 located at English Harbour (Antigua & Barbuda). Initial analyses confirm the identification of the remains as those of the Lyon, ex Beaumont. This French East India Company ship was built in Lorient in...
Integrated Anthrosol Prospection at Betty’s Hope Historic Sugarcane Plantation, Antigua, British West Indies (2015)
Multi-elemental geochemical prospection of soils and sediments has become a highly useful technique for understanding past activity areas and the behaviors that produced them. However, this technique has limited interpretive potential, because it can only identify possible locations of different classes of activities. More importantly, there has been little research to evaluate the processes and elemental loadings that characterize different types of spaces. By studying known contexts and...
Internally Divided: An Archaeological Investigation of a Jamaican Slave Village, 1766 to 1838 (2015)
On the large-scale sugar plantations of the Caribbean, enslaved Africans were forced into dense communities on the scale of small urban townships. In many cases, the "slave village" site was allotted by the plantation owner, though the internal composition was largely left to the choices and dynamics of the enslaved community. This poster summarizes the findings from a recent archaeological survey of the slave village of Good Hope estate, an 18th/early-19th-century sugar plantation in northern...
Interpreting Lesser Antillean Island Domestic and Ritual Practices through Household and Ceramic Analysis at the Goddard Site, Barbados (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Biggs analyzed data collected by Hackenberger and others in 1986 during an archaeological rescue on the Goddard Site, Barbados, West Indies. For this study, students redeveloped ceramic and shell spatial datasets, compiled site maps, and rendered new computer maps of house features and artifact distributions. The semi-circular house (with hearths and...
Interweaved Stories of Resistance: A 1985 Ethnographic Collection in Puerto Rico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In December 2019, the University of Puerto Rico's Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, received as a donation the Waiwai Ethnographic Collection (CRGW), which has survived multiple natural disasters. The CRGW was created by the Centro de Investigaciones Indígenas de Puerto Rico (CIIPR) as the result of an ethnographic expedition undertaken in 1985 in...
Into the mind of an undergrad: personal experience, training and archaeology (2015)
Only in exceptional moments can we explore the thoughts of others. Community archaeology projects, together with the ethical practice of the discipline, foster communication between the academia and the communities. Being part of one of these projects as a research assistant has given me the opportunity of interacting with people of diverse backgrounds, and of learning about their concerns and interests towards archaeology and their historical and cultural heritage. This experience has taught me...
Introduction (2018)
Introduction to the session.
Introduction to Exploring Globalization and Colonization Through Archaeology and Bioarcheology NSF REU Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Globalization and Colonialism through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology: An NSF REU Sponsored Site on the Caribbean’s Golden Rock (Sint Eustatius)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Exploring Globalization and Colonization Through Archaeology and Bioarchaeology National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site located on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius (Statia)...
Investigating animal trade, transport, and translocation in the precolonial Caribbean: New isotopic and zooarchaeological evidence (2016)
Investigations of the dynamic relationships between humans and (non-human) animals are of interest to a broad range of scientific disciplines throughout the world. In the Caribbean, the complexities of island biogeography, transportation technologies, and human agency converge to condition the spatial distribution of both humans and animals. This region has long been characterized as relatively impoverished in higher order species diversity and scarcity of domesticated animals, yet the...
Investigating Variability in Lucayan (Bahamian) Microlith Assemblages (2015)
Chert is an imported non-local raw material that the Lucayans (Bahamas) obtained by way of direct procurement or trade and exchange with the Greater Antilles. The physical composition, morphological characteristics, and measurements of chert microlith assemblages from four Lucayan sites are compared to determine differences and similarities. The observed variability is explained in terms of inter-site differences in tool use and site function, and temporal changes in inter-island socio-political...
Investigations of a Mid-16th Century Iberian Transatlantic Merchant Shipwreck in the Dominican Republic (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Indiana University is conducting underwater archaeological investigations on a mid-16th century Iberian transatlantic merchant ship in collaboration with the Dominican Republic Ministry of Culture. The site was impacted by commercial salvage from 2011 to 2013. However, current investigations indicate significant site integrity,...
Island extinctions and invasions: archaeozoological advance in the French West Indies (2016)
Although island faunas are relatively well studied, there are few clear examples on faunal replacement, over periods of several centuries or a few millennia. This paper brings together results from ten years of zooarchaeological studies in three different Caribbean islands: Saint-Martin, Guadeloupe and Martinique. It presents data on presence (and absence) of terrestrial vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals), in relation to human activities in insular environments during the...
Island Garbology: Methodology, Challenges, and Contributions to the Archaeology of Barbuda (2024)
This is an abstract from the "At the Frontier of Big Climate, Disaster Capitalism, and Endangered Cultural Heritage in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands like Barbuda are particularly sensitive to waste management policies and behaviours; in addition to having to manage their waste daily, they also suffer the effects of tourism and the marine litter washed up on their coasts. These challenges are certainly not new,...
Island Hopper: Theodoor de Booy and Archaeology in the Caribbean (2017)
Like many other regions, the colonial experience in the Caribbean included the arrival of foreign archaeologists, mostly from the United States or Europe representing museums, universities, or scientific academies forming what has been called ‘imperial science.’ The objects, specimens, and archival documentation gathered during their research were taken back to their countries and today form part of major collections in museums throughout the world. Theodoor deBooy of the Museum of the American...
Island societies during the Archaic Age in the Lesser Antilles : the issue of resources in Saint-Martin (2016)
During the 4th millennium before Christ, the Lesser Antilles archipelago witnessed the development of insular societies. These communities which combined shellfish collection, fishing, submarine and terrestrial hunting, a proto-agriculture and gathering, developed a culture there rather specific to the tropical insular context. A diachronic and detailed study of the settlements over close to 4 millennia allows detecting an evolution in the human practices although they appear quite homogeneous...
Islands as gardens: plant translocations by Caribbean Indians as a dynamic and multiscalar form of cultural niche construction, with emphasis on Puerto Rico and the evidence for psychoactive/ritual plant use. (2016)
I consider pre-European plant introductions of exotic fruit trees and other useful plants as a multi-faceted reflection of indigenous plant use, culminating a mosaic of vegetative components in a constructed environment. I focus in particular on the plant constituents of the cajoba ritual complex, drawing especially on recent data from Tibes and Jácana (Puerto Rico), along with relevant ethnographic records from mainland South America that describe ethnobotanical practices associated with...
An Islandscape IFD: Predicting Archaeological Settlements from Grenada to St. Vincent, Eastern Caribbean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the Caribbean-wide models presented in Giovas and Fitzpatrick (2014) and predictive models recently synthesized for Grenada, this study focuses on a fine-grained analysis of environmental and cultural factors affecting settlement locations in the multi-island/archipelagic region from...
It's a Date: A Comparison of Pipe Stem and Ceramics Relative Dating at Christiansted National Historic Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dating techniques, both relative and absolute, are key members of the archaeological toolkit. They serve to chronologically situate the remnants of past peoples, material or otherwise, in the overarching narrative of a place or region. However, not all methods of dating are created equal, and the utility of a particular method for clarifying the historical and...
Jade axes from the site of Pearls, Grenada. A field-based microwear analysis (2017)
This paper reports upon the wear trace analysis of 20 ground stone axes from the Ceramic Age site of Pearls, Grenada. The selection contains several exotic lithic materials including twelve jadeitites, for which the nearest known source is over eleven hundred kilometres away. Pearls is a heavily disturbed site on the Atlantic coast of Grenada, of which much of the material record is held in private custody. Yet, the site holds central importance in the wider interacting region, as a lithic,...
"Jouer sur du velours": Archaeological Evidence of Gaming on Sites of Slavery in the Caribbean and United States (2017)
Hand-carved ceramic discs excavated from historic-period sites across North America and the Caribbean suggest the widespread growth of gaming culture during the third quarter of the 18th century. From Spanish missions and French forts to villages of enslaved people across the British, French, and Spanish colonial domains, people fashioned discs from flat portions of ceramic vessels for use in a variety of games. We begin by exploring the production and use of hand-carved ceramic gaming discs of...
The Jácanas Archaeological Collection: Laying Down the Facts (2017)
While researching an archaeological collection, it is important to trace its history in terms of its origins, what makes up the collection, where it is located, and who is responsible for it. Jácanas, a pre-Columbian site in Ponce, Puerto Ric,o was excavated during the first decade of the 21st century. The fieldwork was carried out by a non-local cultural resources management company under contract with the United States Corps of Engineers (USCE). Among the many concerns expressed by local...
Kalunga!: Identifying Afrodescendant Landscapes in Spanish Santo Domingo, 1502-1822 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first Afrodescendant peoples arrived in the Americas on Spanish ships to the island of Hispaniola in 1492, and by 1502 played an integral role in the development of the colony of Spanish Santo Domingo. Both free and enslaved Afrodescendants undertook most of the labor needed to construct the urban landscapes on the island, as well as the production of...
Keepers of the Cave: The Impact Caretakers Have on the Archaeological Record. (2016)
Caretakers, whether self-appointed or formally selected, have an immense impact on the distribution of material remains at sacred sites in modern day Haiti. This paper examines the ritual use of four caves in Haiti and the effects that four different caretakers have had on the ritual remains left behind after Vodou ceremonies have taken place. These cave/caretaker combinations include publicly accessed caves that are cared for by a cadre of self-appointed homeless men, a cave in private hands...
Kitchen Affairs: First Insights into the Intimacies of Food Plant Preparation at El Flaco, Northern Dominican Republic (XII–XV Centuries) (2018)
Ongoing investigations by the Nexus 1492 Synergy Project (Leiden University) at El Flaco archaeological site, has revealed the existence of an interesting Amerindian hamlet chronologically situated between XII and XV centuries. People who lived and died there, being carriers of the Meillacoid and Chicoid traditions, kept their kitchen areas extremely close to their houses, leaving noticeable remnants of their processing tools (shell scrapers, rudimentary grinding stones), cooking pots and...