New Insights into the Consumption of Cultigens for "Archaic" Age Populations in Cuba: The Archaeological Site of Playa el Mango, Rio Cauto, Granma
Author(s): Yadira Chinique De Armas; Ulises Miguel Gonzalez Herrera; Megan Filyk; Roberto Rodriguez Suarez; Mirjana Roksandic
Year: 2018
Summary
The use of cultigens and wild plants by pre-historic populations has been well established for many regions of the circum-Caribbean and Greater Antilles. However, in the case of Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, the evidence is scarce. In this paper, we examine the population of Playa El Mango (Cauto Region, Eastern Cuba), traditionally understood by Cuban archaeologists as "fisher-gatherers", to examine subsistence practices using a combination of starch evidence from dental calculus, aided by carbon and nitrogen isotopic-based probability analyses (Stable Isotope Analysis in R; SIAR). This dual analysis suggests that C3 (beans, root cultigens) and C4 plants (maize) were part of their diet since at least cal. 2110-2081 BP, along with wild plant species and various readily available estuarine, marine and terrestrial animal resources. This evidence demonstrated the use and management of cultigens for indigenous populations from Eastern Cuba since "Archaic" times.
Cite this Record
New Insights into the Consumption of Cultigens for "Archaic" Age Populations in Cuba: The Archaeological Site of Playa el Mango, Rio Cauto, Granma. Yadira Chinique De Armas, Ulises Miguel Gonzalez Herrera, Megan Filyk, Roberto Rodriguez Suarez, Mirjana Roksandic. Presented at The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC. 2018 ( tDAR id: 445428)
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Keywords
General
arctic
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Paleoethnobotany
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Subsistence and Foodways
Geographic Keywords
Caribbean
Spatial Coverage
min long: -90.747; min lat: 3.25 ; max long: -48.999; max lat: 27.683 ;
Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 22728