Caribbean landscapes during the late-precolonial and early-colonial periods

Summary

People in the Caribbean have been interacting with their landscapes for at least 8,000 years (Trinidad), sometimes in ways that leave only subtle traces of actions and in others the evidence is dramatic. Over this span we see variable trajectories of landscape engagements, ranging from early relatively intense activities followed by abandonment to continuous occupations throughout prehistory to places occupied late in the historical sequence. First colonizers to the Caribbean modified and eventually managed landscapes to create places recognizable to them as home. Later groups of people built on and further modified these constructed places so that by today the landscapes contain a cumulative record of anthropogenic history. In this paper, we address paleoecological evidence for the late precolonial and early European colonial occupations on and impacts to selected landscapes in the eastern Caribbean

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Caribbean Environmental Archaeology: New Perspectives on Human Ecodynamics and Social Relations

Keywords

Spatial Coverage