The Evolution of Plant Resource Diversity in Precolonial Puerto Rico with Direct Implications for the Rest of the Greater Antilles

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.

Except for Jamaica, the earliest human occupations in the Greater Antilles date to ca. 6000 cal yr BP. Contrary to older ideas, the view taking shape now is that survival strategies incorporated a range of plant domesticates along with wild resources obtained through foraging, collecting, hunting, and fishing. This should not be surprising, since the earliest colonizers of the Greater Antilles originated in Central America, where agriculture is well documented by ca. 5000 to 7000 BP (Piperno and Pearsall 1998). In this paper, we trace the evolution of plant resource diversity through time from the earliest occupations of Puerto Rico. The earliest settlers on the island created anthropogenic landscapes, which later colonists further modified with new introductions of plants originating in lowland South America. Radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental records are integrated with biodiversity trends in modeling dispersal and colonization processes in the precolonial Caribbean. Applying measures of biodiversity, richness, and evenness to microbotanical datasets available for Puerto Rico reveal declines in diversity for both the initial and later colonizing populations of the island. These findings are consistent with expectations from agroecology, whereby productive domesticates are identified and over time exploited in greater proportions to other taxa, both wild and domesticated.

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): 38169.0