Highlights in the pre-contact archaeology of the island Caribbean

Abstract

The Caribbean islands were the first—and perhaps only—archipelago in the Americas to be settled by Indigenous peoples who went to sea without a guarantee of island inter-visibility. Using dugout canoes and taking advantage of prevailing winds and currents, both major and minor population movements left the South American littoral zone (and perhaps other source regions) in different stages between about 6000 and 1500 years ago. Indigenous groups first settled islands that were closest to the mainland, ultimately reaching the various Greater and Lesser Antilles over a period of some 5000–6000 years. An increasing amount of archaeological research in recent decades, coupled with advances in various analytical techniques, has helped to significantly enhance the understanding of Indigenous origins and cultural lifeways in the Caribbean. This chapter focuses on several areas of research that have led to a better understanding of the origins, environmental interactions, resource use, diet, and mobility of those who first settled these islands and their later descendants: (1) how pottery, as the most ubiquitous artifact type, has played a prominent but disproportionate role in developing cultural chronologies; (2) the role of zooarchaeology—long an important avenue for examining subsistence and anthropogenic impacts on animals—in establishing the antiquity and refining the understanding of non-native animal introductions in the Caribbean; and (3) isotopic analysis, which has been useful for analyzing mobility, nutrition, diet, and health in the insular Caribbean and saw some of its first applications in the region during the method’s earliest development.