Adapting (or Not) to Changing Seas: The Past, Present, and Future of a Southern Puerto Rican Shellscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Forty-six newly documented anthropogenic shell works, stretching along 1.5 km of a paleoshoreline in the intertidal zone of southwestern Puerto Rico constitute a precontact landscape (a shellscape, if you will) without parallel on the island. Besides evidencing subsistence practices, these monumental features speak to the culturally mediated adaptive strategies of some of the island’s early inhabitants (ca. 3000—1500 calbp). Refinements to the radiocarbon chronology of these works, combined with new geoarchaeological data from nearby marine cores, provide novel insights into the timing and adaptive processes behind the shellscape’s formation and use, speaking to the agency and decision-making undertaken in light of environmental change by the maritime hunter-gatherers who built these works over nearly fifteen centuries. The addition of recent remote sensing data (multispectral satellite imagery and topobathymetric LiDAR) provides complementary information on ongoing changes in and around the shellscape, indicating that human-driven climate change is already increasing its exposure and vulnerability to the adverse effects of rising tides, wave action, and storm surges. Lamentably, a continuation of current trends may result in the loss of an irretrievable cultural resource that tells a significant portion of the story of the island’s earliest inhabitants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52636