Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A century of research on the early inhabitants (previously called “Archaic” peoples) of the Caribbean has, too often, been restricted by boundaries and labels, be they geopolitical borders or the temporal and cultural categories assigned by colonial historical sources or early archaeologists. Recent decades have seen many relevant advances, both methodological and theoretical, in the reconstruction and conceptions of these early lifeways, and yet conversations and discussions that cross these lines/boundaries are too few (with the exception of work like Hofman and Antczak 2019), thereby reifying the labels and forestalling the development of more refined understandings of this early period, its people, their ways of being, sociocultural interactions, and transcendence to other spaces and moments of the precolonial Caribbean. This symposium features the research of scholars working across the insular and mainland Caribbean and intends to scale-up discussions about recent findings and theoretical and methodological perspectives concerning the first Caribbean population from local or regional research to the entirety of the circum-Caribbean area. The objective is to build new understandings of the diversity and commonalities of the early Caribbean populations from a multiscalar perspective and create research synergies that cross the diverse boundaries that have limited their better comprehension.