Transplanted at the Coast: The Adaptation of Caribbean Resourcing Practices during the Late Holocene

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The movement of early agriculturalists from the South American continent during the Early and Late Ceramic Ages (500 BCE–1500 CE) marked a significant transformation of the cultural landscapes of the Caribbean archipelago. These arriving groups expressed a strong cultural identity in their ceramic materials, settlement patterns, mixed subsistence strategies, and intra- and interisland exchange networks. These migrations coincided with the changing environmental and climatic contexts of the Late Holocene where shifting depositional contexts, wetter conditions, and more frequent and intense storms impacted areas preferable for traditional settlement and food resourcing. In the midst of these changing and unfamiliar environments, how did these groups adapt and/or continue to emulate cultural practices in the colonization processes of the Caribbean? Focusing on recent zooarchaeological and geoarchaeological analyses of Tierra Nuevas, a continuously inhabited Ceramic Age site located on the northern coast of Puerto Rico, this paper draws from the landscape learning framework to examine how the changing climate of the period challenged the production and reproduction of locational and limitational landscape knowledge. We then use the Transplanted Knowledge framework, a novel conceptual synthesis, to assess how traditional resourcing practices were adapted or emulated in these changing climatic contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36902.0