New Insights into the Archaic of the circum-Caribbean

With the development of new trends in long-term perspectives on human ecodynamics, multidimensional approaches to biocultural evolution, and synergies between modellers and palaeoecologists, research on the early peoples of the circum-Caribbean became increasingly interdisciplinary and informed by the realization that humans are not passive adaptors to their environment but creatively shape and re-shape it as a landscape, while being simultaneously molded through dynamic biological, sociocultural and environmental feedbacks. Concomitantly with these theoretical shifts, aided by increasingly sophisticated techniques, the approaches aimed at disclosing the origin of the Archaic Age populations, their mobility and exchange, modes of life, and transitions to horticulture have also been transformed. No longer are these phenomena perceived as caused by single ‘revolutionary’ events, but as multistranded trajectories depending on combinations of economic, social and ideological processes, liberated from the dependency on propitious environmental conditions, and from the previously inseparable co-phenomena of sedentarism, domestication, and pottery making. The approaches have also been changed by the denial of any clear-cut distinction between foragers and farmers’ modes of living and world viewing.

We aim to discuss new theoretical, methodological and analytical approaches, that are used to understand the origins and dynamics of the Archaic Age in the Circum-Caribbean.