Caribbean (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (597 Records)
Current zooarchaeological records indicate that humans introduced domestic guinea pig from South America to the Caribbean islands around AD 600. Using zooarchaeological and ancient DNA datasets from domestic guinea pig remains in the Caribbean, we address human mobility and interaction between the islands of the Caribbean and South America during the second half of the Ceramic Age (ca. AD 600-1500). We present new data regarding the continental origins of pre-Columbian guinea pig in the...
Pre-Columbian Vertebrate Remains from the Coconut Walk Site, Nevis, West Indies (2015)
Archaeological investigation of the Pre-Columbian site of Coconut Walk on the island of Nevis (northern Lesser Antilles) revealed midden deposits dating between ca. AD 850-1440. While the site had been previously excavated by the British Time Team television show in 1998, only cursory examination of faunal remains was conducted (NISP=451). We report on the complete analysis of more than 18,000 recovered vertebrate remains from a 5×5m trench in the core midden area, providing enhanced...
Precolumbian Mortuary Practices in Antigua (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A series of burials were excavated from one of the longest inhabited precolumbian sites in the Caribbean, Indian Creek located in Antigua. Research on mortuary practices throughout the Caribbean remain sparse, with varied excavation strategies and limited documentation further complicating our understanding. Our research design integrated geoarchaeological...
Prehistoric Exploitation of the Manatee in the Maya and Circum-Caribbean Areas (1985)
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.
Prehistoric Population Mobility in the Caribbean: Genetic and Isotopic Investigations at Grand Bay, Carriacou, West Indies (2015)
Archaeological research at Grand Bay, a large Late Ceramic Age (ca. AD 400-1300) Amerindian village site on Carriacou in the southern Caribbean, has revealed vast amounts of evidence that sheds light on Pre-Columbian adaptations to small island environments. More than a decade of research here and at other locations on Carriacou have revealed dozens of human burials, including many found in mortuary contexts rarely seen in this part of the Lesser Antilles. Ongoing research on past lifeways of...
A Prehistory of South America: Ancient Cultural Diversity on the Least Known Continent (2014)
A Prehistory of South America is an overview of the ancient and historic native cultures of the entire continent of South America based on the most recent archaeological investigations. This accessible, clearly written text is designed to engage undergraduate and beginning graduate students in anthropology. For more than 12,000 years, South American cultures ranged from mobile hunters and gatherers to rulers and residents of colossal cities. In the process, native South American societies...
Preliminary ancient DNA analysis suggests a complex origins scenario for pre-contact Puerto Rican populations (2016)
Recent archaeological research suggests that indigenous groups in Puerto Rico stemmed from multiple and continuous migrations of continental indigenous populations. This view is supported by contemporary genetic studies, which have found evidence of genetic affinity between multiple modern Native American groups and the native ancestry components of modern, admixed Puerto Ricans. Overall, these findings challenge the traditional single-migration model for the peopling of Puerto Rico, and suggest...
Preliminary Investigations on a Coastal Caribbean Island: A Multi-proxy Environmental Study at the Sabazan Amerindian Site, Carriacou, Grenada (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Amerindian, enslaved African, and European peoples who successively settled the Caribbean island of Carriacou beginning AD 400 encountered a distinctive environment marked by recurrent drought, few terrestrial fauna, and the largest reef system in the region. Evidence suggests Carriacou’s ecology was altered dramatically by humans, reflecting efforts to...
Preliminary Results Project Naval Shipwrecks in West Indies during the American Revolutionary Period 1774-1783 (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper aims to present preliminary results of the first year of the project dealing with three naval shipwrecks sites in West Indies. In English Harbour (Antigua) the remains of a wreck possibly identified as the Lyon (ex Beaumont) are evaluated. The first archaeological assessment indicates the presence of a large wooden hull...
Preservation of Faunal Remains from an Underwater Cavern, Padre Nuestro, Dominican Republic (2015)
Between 2005 and 2010, Indiana University dive teams performed surface collections of the entrance chamber to Padre Nuestro Cavern, a submerged limestone cavern located in the East National Park in the southeastern peninsula of the Dominican Republic. They extracted Taino ceramics, Casimiroid lithics, and many faunal remains including two extinct sloth species (Acrotocnus ye and Parocnus serus), an extinct platyrrhine monkey (Antillothris bernensis), and other commingled bones including sloth,...
A Propitious Influence: Mary Beaudry’s Contributions to Historical and Contemporary Archaeology in the Caribbean (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Mary Beaudry never promoted herself as an island archaeologist, but throughout the course of her accomplished career she conducted or participated on research projects on several islands, including in the Boston Harbor, the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and Nevis and Montserrat in...
Provisioned and Caught: Historic Perspectives on Diet in the Danish West Indies (2018)
Historic records indicate that during the late 18th and into the 19th century preserved North Atlantic fishes were shipped to the West Indies as a relatively cheap source of protein to feed enslaved persons and also the planter class. However, in historic zooarchaeological analyses of faunal assemblages from the Caribbean, the presence of these food remains is often not identified. Using two sites from the Danish West Indies, a case will be made for the use of fine-screen techniques to ensure...
Provisioning Antigua and Beyond: How Herding and Farming Transformed Barbuda, West Indies (2016)
The island of Barbuda was farmed by English settlers from the 1660s onwards. The Codrington family of England held the lease to the island from the 1680s-1870, and they introduced a variety of plant and animal species, some of which continue to thrive on the island. Sugar cane was never grown on this dry, low lying island and instead, lime and charcoal were produced along with other subsistence crops for export. Herding became an important part of the economy and, as a result, water management...
Proyekto Paisahe Kultural di Kòrsou: The Environmental Legacy of Curaçao’s Cultural Landscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, the Curaçao Cultural Landscape Project (CCLP) initiated a long-term field investigation on the ecological legacy of Indigenous and European colonial occupation of Curaçao, in the southern Caribbean. Drawing together multi-proxy records from human settlement, resource use, and environmental conditions over ca. 4500 years, this interdisciplinary...
Puerto Rican Cultural Heritage Under Threat by Climate Change (2017)
As a tropical, oceanic island in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, Puerto Rico is feeling the effects of climate change. Rising sea level, increased storminess, and unpredictable sudden weather events combine with heavy coastal occupation and little or no coherent development planning, to increase social vulnerability to coastal change. The burden of economic problems that the Island is suffering from also increases the complexities of working towards resiliency. Within this context, coastal...
Puerto Rico’s Cook Books: Recipes of a History (2016)
Puerto Rico’s history is a blend of the different ethnicities that settled in the island after the Spanish Conquest. This ethnogenesis can be studied through the culinary traditions that conform what we now refer to as criollo. Using the works of Mary C. Beaudry and Elizabeth M. Scott as a sounding board, this research consists of two parts. First, an analysis of cooking books available in Puerto Rico during the 19th century in order to establish the different methods and tools available at the...
Putting a Man in the Machine: Experimental Archaeology and Computational Modeling (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, numerous studies have shown the importance of the links that existed between the various islands of the Caribbean archipelago in pre-Columbian times. The notion of connection has thus become the central paradigm of the approach of these island but not isolated societies. Thus, until now little addressed, the question of assessing the...
Quantifying Pre-Industrial to Mid-Late 20th Century Anthropogenic Lead and Mercury Pollution in Caribbean Marine Environments (2015)
Various lines of evidence indicate that levels of anthropogenic pollutants, such as lead and mercury, have increased in terrestrial and atmospheric environments since the early 19th century and the advent of industrialization. While exposure to these two heavy metals is a global concern, this study focused primarily on marine environments located in the Caribbean. Using ICP-MS, this study aimed to detect and quantify anthropogenic pollutants, specifically lead (Pb) and mercury (Hg), using...
Quantitative Paleodietary Reconstruction with Complex Foodwebs: An Isotopic Case Study from the Caribbean (2018)
Stable isotope analysis is one of the most effective tools for paleodietary reconstruction and has been widely applied to a vast array of archaeological contexts including the Caribbean region. This region, however, possesses a particularly complex isotopic ecology, including both a large number of isotopically variable food sources and a high degree of isotopic overlap between different food groups. As such, to date, most regional paleodietary studies have been limited to descriptive and...
Queering Colonization in Early Colonial Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological narratives of colonial contact have dramatically shifted from a focus on colonizer/colonized dichotomies to discussions about plurality, ethnogenesis, and hybridity. However, much of the work in Mesoamerica continues to define the practice of colonization through a...
Raiders of the Lost Arca: An Early Foraging Landscape in Cabo Rojo/Lajas, Southwestern Puerto Rico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent fieldwork in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico has revealed a landscape of over 40 heretofore undocumented shell mounds (some as large as 4,200 m2 and as tall as 10 m above the surrounding tidal plain) formed by millennia of targeted human foraging...
Rancherías: Historical Archaeology of Early Colonial Campsites on Margarita and Coche Islands, Venezuela (2017)
Little is known from the present-day archaeological perspective of early colonial realities of Margarita and Coche islands located in north-eastern Venezuela, in the state of Nueva Esparta. Moreover, the island of Coche has never been surveyed archaeologically. This paper discusses the preliminary results of systematic archaeological surveys of Coche and the southern coast of Margarita Island, carried out within the frame of the Nexus 1492 ERC research project coordinated by Leiden University....
Reassessing the 1898 U.S. assault on Asomante through battlefield archeology (2016)
Military confrontations during the first half of August of 1898, between Coamo and Aibonito, Puerto Rico, were the last known developments of the Spanish-American War. Historically, this area has been listed as the last battlefield of Spain in America. There are several factors about these military events, such as scarcity of historical resources, political conflicts of interest, and the unseemly lack of archeological research, that have kept them from being defined in the academic literature....
Reassessing the Ballajá Archaeological Collection (2018)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, archaeological research was undertaken in urban blocks of the Santo Domingo and Ballajá wards producing one of the largest collections from within the city walls of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Part of the collection was transferred to the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. This presentation explores the contents of the collection in terms of artifacts, documents, drawings, and photographs. The objective...
Recent archaeological excavations at the Aklis Site, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands (2015)
The Aklis site (12VAm1-42) is a multicomponent prehistoric conch shell midden containing cemetery and habitation components. Large portions of the site are currently subject to damage from rising sea levels and modern disturbances, including looting. Salvage excavations of two sets of human remains in 2012 led to the development of an archaeological field school in 2014, offered by Mississippi State University and in conjunction with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Survey and excavation...