Bones of the Lucayans: Radiocarbon dating of human remains from the Bahamian Archipelago

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Bahamas were among the last islands to be settled in the Caribbean, with no known occupation prior to ca. AD 600 and reportedly complete depopulation by ca. AD 1520. The constrained island setting and restricted timescale provides an excellent opportunity to address a range of questions relating to island adaptations, all requiring a robust chronology. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of a new AMS radiocarbon dating project focusing on human remains from the Bahamian archipelago, which will eventually provide 60 new determinations, comprising nearly half the total number of human remains known from the islands. The preliminary results – combined with previously available dates on humans and other materials – are modeled using Bayesian statistics, in order to address questions of initial colonization and post-Columbian collapse, the latter particularly catastrophic in the archipelago. Spatial and temporal differences in island adaptations will also be explored using stable carbon and nitrogen isotope measurements of the dated human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23529