A Zooarchaeological Meta-analysis of Ceramic Age Marine Fish Harvesting across the Caribbean Archipelago: Generating Baselines for Assessing “Stability”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Zooarchaeological baselines of human-animal engagements and their outcomes are increasingly critical to modeling what community stability looked like in the past and what we can learn from it today. Concomitantly, zooarchaeological baselines also provide critical measures of biodiversity distribution, loss, or persistence through time for use in conservation. Here, we share the initial results from an ongoing meta-analysis of marine fish harvest across the Caribbean Archipelago, a renowned biocultural diversity hotspot, during the Ceramic Age (~500 BC–AD 1500). We present the first synthetic baseline of marine fish taxonomic diversity and harvest trends across 34 islands, 75 sites, and approximately 182,000 NISP. Our results indicate definite trends in marine fish harvest, while also highlighting critical gaps in data needed to better render as chronologically, geographically, and taxonomically holistic as possible zooarchaeological perspectives of marine vertebrate subsistence stability (or not) through time. More broadly, these data provide a foundation from which to assess differential archaeological interpretations of Ceramic Age community sustainability (via vertebrate subsistence patterns) and develop intraregional hypotheses addressing diachronic, multiscalar patterns of socioecological resilience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37708.0