Curaçao’s Oldest Site: Dates from the Rif St Marie Rockshelter Revise Earliest Island Settlement

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2022, the Curaçao Cultural Landscape Project (CCLP) initiated a long-term field investigation on the ecological legacy of Indigenous and European colonial occupation of Curaçao, in the southern Caribbean. Excavation at a recently identified rockshelter site along the inland bay of Rif St. Marie (RSMA) identified significant archaeological deposits comprising lithic and coral artifacts, shell and bone, and several large combustion features. Three closely aligned radiocarbon dates on charcoal place the RSMA Rockshelter within the Archaic period and indicate that the site is Curaçao’s earliest, extending the antiquity of human settlement on the island to the early fourth millennium BC. We report on the archaeological findings to date from the RSMA Rockshelter and the implications of the revised settlement chronology for Curaçao’s earliest colonization and the evolution of the island’s cultural landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39445.0