Connecting Archaic Age Communities in the Insular Caribbean

Summary

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

The study of ancient Caribbean communities through archaeogenomic methods has seen an increased interest in recent years. In our study in 2020, we demonstrated that the Archaic Age Communities in the Greater Antilles exhibit a different genetic signal from the Ceramic Age communities in the Greater and Lesser Antilles. Still, we could not add more detail beyond those previously obtained from archaeological research. The low genetic variation--a consequence of repeated bottlenecks in the settlement processes of the Americas and the Insular Caribbean--imposes strong limits on the identification of genetic diversity, leaving open many questions about the interactions between and within pre-colonial communities during and at the end of the Archaic Age in the islands. This presentation provides a critical review of the potential and limitations of ancient DNA research in the understanding of genetic diversity in the Insular Caribbean and deploys newly developed methods identifying genetic relationships based on segments identical by descent (IBD). This method provides a new resolution in investigating connections and interactions between communities, exemplified here on the analysis of the genomes obtained from Canimar Abajo and archaeologically similar communities in the insular Caribbean.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40288.0