Caribbean (Geographic Keyword)
376-400 (597 Records)
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. Little is known about the mortuary patterns of enslaved and freed Africans during the 18th to early 19th century on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius. Excavation and analysis of burials from a small 18th century cemetery...
Mortuary Practices at the Pre-Columbian Site of Indian Creek, Antigua - Preliminary Results (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the preliminary results from recent excavations at Indian Creek, Antigua that have helped identify, document, and recover four late period Saladoid burials. Despite this being the longest continuously inhabited site on Antigua, and one of the longest continuously inhabited sites in the Caribbean, only one other complete burial has been...
Mundus vult decipi: Caribbean Indigenous Art Past, Present, Future (2018)
The 1990s, with quincentenary ‘celebrations’ and two highly influential Taino art exhibits in Paris and New York (the epicentres of the pre-Columbian art market), heralded a seismic increase of indigenous Caribbean art forgeries. But these weren’t the first indications of an emerging market: Caribbean forgeries had been circulating since at least the 1950s. The artistic heritage of the pre-Columbian Caribbean still remains largely understudied, with far smaller-scale production than seen in...
Musket Balls as Fish Net Sinkers: A Biographical Analysis of Material Reuse from the 18th-Century British Virgin Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When identifying and cataloging artifacts, archaeologists use a variety of techniques to increase the understanding of a site based on the analysis of excavated artifacts. A widely used method is to classify artifacts by their function– although function is often difficult to pinpoint for...
Narratives of the Recent Past: La Playa Slum as a Case Study. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The slum of "La Playa" in the municipality of Arecibo, northern coast of Puerto Rico, existed from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. This study presents the results of researching this type of site using documentary sources that include maps, plans, photographs, population data and newspaper articles. The objectives of...
Native Raizal Heritage: Landscape Utilization and Cultural Patrimony on Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands, Colombia (1629–Present) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The islands of Old Providence and Santa Catalina, located 130 miles of the coast of Nicaragua and around 8.5 square miles in size, have been a center of global trade, resource extraction, and military action since 1629, when the English Puritan venture capitalists of the Providence Island Company—whose shareholders also held stakes...
Natural vs. Human-caused Extinctions of Terrestrial Vertebrates in the Bahamas (2016)
We report 83 taxa of vertebrates (11 reptiles, 63 birds, 9 mammals) from late Pleistocene bone deposits in Sawmill Sink, Abaco, The Bahamas. These bones were recovered by scuba divers in non-cultural contexts at water depths of 27-35 m. Among the 83 species, 40 (48%) no longer occur on Abaco (4 reptiles, 31 birds, 5 mammals). We estimate that 17 of the 40 losses (all of them birds) are linked to changes during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (~15 to 9 ka) in climate (becoming more warm and...
Nautical Archaeology of Padre Island (1978)
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.
Near-Surface Geophysical Survey of a 17th/18th century trading factory at LaSoye, Dominica. (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Encounters on the Caribbean Frontier: Archaeology at LaSoye, Dominica", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2017, storm surges exposed archaeological deposits near LaSoye Point located on the north-eastern coast of Dominica. A year later, a small-scale excavation—focusing on the exposed coastal features of the site—revealed remnants of a structure, an extramural activity area, and a wide range of...
Networks of the Dead: exploring patterns of homogeneity and diversity in the precolonial Caribbean using network analysis (2017)
The precolonial Caribbean shows great diversity in burial patterns across time and space, making the interpretation of funerary behavior very complex. While some broad trends in funerary practices have been noted, a simple assessment of the frequency of different burial practices in the region reveals a range of body positions and body treatment, as well as burial location, and grave goods. In this paper we use statistical and network explorative approaches to map these variable practices. A...
Neutron Activated Analysis of Afro-Caribbean Ware Excavated Archaeologically from Six Pre-Emancipation Sugar Plantation sites on Anguilla and Sint Maarten (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of neutron activation analysis (NAA) conducted at the University of Missouri Research Reactor’s Archaeometry Lab on coarse earthenware sherds recovered archaeologically from three pre-emancipation era plantation sites on Anguilla and three on Sint Maarten. Using sourcing studies, this research investigates...
New Approaches to Study Health and Disease in the Pre-Colonial circum-Caribbean (2017)
The most frequent pathologies found throughout the circum-Caribbean before arrival of the Europeans are dental and periodontal diseases. To date, ancient oral health has been studied using a variety of techniques, and recently ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis of dental calculus (calcified plaque) has shown great promise in revealing not only (oral) health and disease, but also diet and the composition of the oral microbiome over archaeological timescales. In this paper, we present ancient metagenomic...
New Insights into the Consumption of Cultigens for "Archaic" Age Populations in Cuba: The Archaeological Site of Playa el Mango, Rio Cauto, Granma (2018)
The use of cultigens and wild plants by pre-historic populations has been well established for many regions of the circum-Caribbean and Greater Antilles. However, in the case of Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, the evidence is scarce. In this paper, we examine the population of Playa El Mango (Cauto Region, Eastern Cuba), traditionally understood by Cuban archaeologists as "fisher-gatherers", to examine subsistence practices using a combination of starch evidence from dental calculus,...
The Nicaraguan Rise and the Problem of Early Peopling of the Greater Antilles (2015)
This presentation examines the patterns of interaction in the Greater Antilles at the time of early migrations, the sources of those population movements and the reasons behind them, with a special focus on the probable links between Lower Central America and the Western Caribbean, in light of recent research results from several academic fields, such as archaeology; aDNA studies; physical anthropology; toponomastics. It investigates developments that made possible such long distance maritime...
No Man or Woman is an Island Revisited: The Social Construction of Small Island Space (2015)
The construction of space usually begins with the georeferencing of physical boundaries. As such, space becomes an external container that affects the structure of it contents. This paper explores the construction of space from the perspective of the individual. It begins by recognizing the minimal distance of face-to-face interactions and expands outward from there. The first step is to reject three-dimensional space and to situate the individual in an n-dimensional space. Production,...
On Puerto Rican Archaeology (1965)
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.
On the Edge of the New World: Colonizing the Bahamas (2017)
The Bahama archipelago is the last place colonized in the New World, and the first encountered by Europeans. Previous efforts to explain the arrival of humans followed the stepping-stone model of expansion that began in the Orinoco River drainage of lowland Venezuela. Communities island-hopped through the Lesser Antilles, expanded into the Greater Antilles, and continued their northward migration through the southern Bahamas after crossing the last open water gap between Hispaniola and the Turks...
On the Historicity of Carib Migrations in the Lesser Antilles (1980)
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.
On the trail of Calinago Ethnographic Objects from the Lesser Antilles in European Museums (2016)
From the first contacts with the Amerindians, conquerors, voyagers, missionaries and so on have brought back to Europe numerous attributes of the New World: natural curiosities as well as manufactured objects. Various historical sources attest to the presence in France of seventeenth and eighteenth century Amerindian objects from the Lesser Antilles in some cabinets of curiosities. Today, paradoxically, not a single object in contemporary collections is attributed to the Calinago or so called...
On the way to the islands: the role of early domestic plants in the initial peopling of the Antilles (2016)
Indigenous people initiated their dispersal toward the Caribbean isles at sometime around 8000 to 7800 years before present. This time framework coincides with the consolidation/aggregation and eventual transference of new dietary suites (domestic plants) to long distances, having been this process one that initiated at least in two different and mutually distant regions of continental America. This presentation explores the feasibility of the ideal free distribution (IFD) and diet breadth (DB)...
One Island, Two Stories: Tradition, Ritual and Identity in Barbuda, West Indies (2016)
Barbuda, the small sister island to Antigua, provides a unique geographically bound island context for the study of human-environmental interactions over the last 6000 years. Today, Barbuda’s national animal is the fallow deer, Dama dama dama, a species that is native to a small area of Anatolia but that has been transported around the world by people. According to historical accounts, fallow deer were imported to Barbuda, from England, by the Codrington family, the island’s primary leaseholders...
Origin of the Pitch Lake: An Amerindian Myth from Trinidad (2017)
Although Trinidad is referred to in various myths of the Warao and Arawak of the Orinoco delta and the Guiana coastal zone, only one mythical tradition is known which was documented among the Amerindians formerly living on the island. Explaining the origin of the major asphalt seepage known as the Pitch Lake in southwest Trinidad, this myth appears to be closely related to part of a mythological cycle related by the Lokóno (Arawak) of Guyana and northwest Suriname which narrates the...
Origins and Migrations of Crops in Tropical Africa. Origins of African Plants (1976)
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.
The Osteobiography of Human Remains from the Seaview and Indian Town Trail Archaeological Sites (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. Climate change and privatization activities related to disaster capitalism threaten land ownership rights and landscape preservation in Barbuda. Barbuda is home to multigenerational residences, businesses, schools, and buildings of cultural significance. Also, on this land...
Overview and Preliminary Results from the 2022 Excavation at Fort Louise Augusta, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The former Danish West Indies are one of the scant examples of Scandinavian colonialism and the only example of Danish colonialism in the Americas. Although considered latecomers to the region, the Danes maintained almost continuous control of their West Indies from their initial settlement until the islands were sold to the United States in 1917. This...