Genomic Contributions to Understanding Early Caribbean Settlement

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.

In the Caribbean, archaeological and linguistic research have contributed a wealth of knowledge to our understanding of human settlement, yet many issues surrounding dispersal trajectories, adaptation to island environments, and population dynamics over time are still debated. In recent decades, genomic findings have begun to transform our understanding of regional population dynamics and address longstanding questions. Additionally, ancient DNA (aDNA) has quickly become a promising method for exploring human population origins and dispersals in island systems. Despite these advances, the application of paleogenomic techniques for studying ancient Caribbean peoples has primarily focused on individuals dating to the last ~2,500 years and from a small number of islands. Here, we discuss the potential contributions that paleogenomics can make toward elucidating the origins of the earliest Caribbean inhabitants and past interactions between contemporaneous and later island communities. Additionally, we will present preliminary results of an aDNA study of human Ancestors from the Ortiz site located in southwestern Puerto Rico, currently the oldest dated from the island. We will discuss how these data, when contextualized with existing archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence, shed light on the lifeways of Puerto Rico’s earliest known inhabitants.

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): 38835.0