Raiders of the Lost Arca: An Early Foraging Landscape in Cabo Rojo/Lajas, Southwestern Puerto Rico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent fieldwork in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico has revealed a landscape of over 40 heretofore undocumented shell mounds (some as large as 4,200 m2 and as tall as 10 m above the surrounding tidal plain) formed by millennia of targeted human foraging activity focused on genus Arca. Initial radiocarbon dates indicate that these mounds were formed between roughly 1200 cal BC and cal AD 450 (with further dates forthcoming), associating them with some of the earliest inhabitants of Puerto Rico, and making them contemporary with other, more distributed, middens in the surrounding region. Relatively undisturbed ancient landscapes of such size and density have no known parallels in Puerto Rico, but these features do share taxonomic similarities to other sites in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Lesser Antilles. Here, we present the results of combined archaeological excavation and paleoenvironmental reconstruction of nearshore habitats in the environs of the anthropogenic landscape, to evaluate and disentangle a series of equifinal behavioral explanations for their formation, persistence, and ultimate abandonment. Ultimately, we anticipate that this work will provide valuable insights into the interface between human foraging activities and paleoenvironmental change in an early period of Caribbean archipelagic occupation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38078.0