Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of the Bahama archipelago continues to advance as archaeologists tackle old questions and take on new ones with greater theoretical and methodological sophistication. In this session, we demonstrate how the application of an array of scientific techniques, many of them new to Bahamian archaeology, is broadening our knowledge and understanding of animal and plant translocations, paleoclimate, culinary traditions, and the circulation of exotics, during the Lucayan occupation of the Bahama islands. Excavation findings from previously unreported sites on Long Island and Providenciales present new perspectives on the Lucayan creation of the landscape and from San Salvador on craft production. The analyses of materials from previously reported sites on San Salvador provide new understandings of the temporal variability of molluscan assemblages and from Eleuthera on the sensory properties of cavescapes. Each of the papers demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinarity for constructing a deeper understanding of the archipelago’s rich indigenous history and for situating the Bahamas in the larger Antillean seascape.