The First Paleoethnobotanical Evidence from the Grenadines, Southern Lesser Antilles Provides Insight into Smaller Island Adaptations

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Seashore Sites and Environments in Geoarchaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Located approximately 190 km north of South America and measuring 32km2, Carriacou is the largest of the Grenadine islands and a promising case for understanding human eco dynamics in the Lesser Antilles. The island exhibits well-stratified midden deposits with a variety of faunal remains suggesting the primacy of fishing/marine foraging subsistence supplemented by introduced South American animals. While the biogeographic reorganization of these land mammals across the southern Lesser Antilles is relatively well understood, there is a paucity of research on the timing and intensity of food production systems. Here, we present findings from microbotanical analysis of soils recovered from Sabazan, one of the two largest coastal village sites on Carriacou. Radiocarbon dates suggest continuous occupation and possible expansion of the site from ca. AD 400–1400. We assess how vegetal regimes have changed to reflect anthropogenic landscapes which help to better understand how socio-environmental feedback responses shaped life in littoral zones. This work builds on the use of islands as “model ecosystems” for understanding human-driven, terrestrial-marine entanglements and contributes to a growing corpus of data that illuminate the specific ways humans were modifying their landscapes, changing local ecologies, and interfacing between terrestrial and marine resource bases.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ancient Seashore Sites and Environments in Geoarchaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51573