Similarity and Diversity in the Prehistoric Colonization of Islands and Coasts by Food-Producing Communities

ABSTRACT

The colonization of the Pacific, Caribbean, and Mediterranean by food-producing communities in prehistory has rarely been considered in an explicitly comparative perspective. This article suggests that, despite evident human and environmental diversity, these insular colonization episodes have certain formal and processual similarities, especially in terms of the rate and dynamics of the colonization episodes. Specifically, in all three cases, colonizing populations seem to have rapidly crossed very great distances to find new niches, only for these events to be followed by generations of colonizing inactivity. It is proposed that such patterning may be a feature which is somehow common to episodes of coastal and insular colonization by food-producing, pre-state communities. Reasons as to why this might be—including ecological and demographic factors—are considered. This study indicates the utility of a comparative approach, and contributes to the ongoing debate centered on the extent to which insularity conditions human behavior.

Keywords:

• Caribbean
• colonization
• islands
• Mediterranean
• Pacific

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Cyprian Broodbank, Mike Carson, John Cherry, Anne van Duijvenbode, Gill Leppard, Mac Marston, Brad Sekedat, and Chantel White, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for comments on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks are due to Scott Fitzpatrick and Elizabeth Murphy for extensive comments and suggestions; to Peter Rowley-Conwy for access to as-yet unpublished material; and to Reg Murphy, Nicki Murphy, and Sam Rebovich, for providing the idyllic setting in which the first draft of the article was written.

Thomas P. Leppard is now affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, Southern Connecticut State University.

Notes

It is probable that late Archaic populations in the Greater Antilles were practicing routine exploitation of certain species (e.g., Newsom and Wing 2004; Pagan Jimenez and Rodriguez Ramos 2007). However, controversy surrounds the extent to which later Ceramic staples (maize, manioc) were utilized; any exploitation of these species seems to have been very low-intensity, with greater emphasis placed on maritime subsistence (Newsom and Wing 2004). The difference in scale and mode of exploitation (Mickleburgh and Pagán-Jiménez 2012) suggests that only sedentary Ceramic age populations could be considered to practice a fully “Neolithic,” horticultural mode of production.

See Dawson (2008, 2011) for recent syntheses of island colonization events, confirming (Cherry 1990) that the larger Mediterranean islands were settled in preference to small; Early Neolithic settlement is confined to Cyprus, Crete, and the semi-continental circum-Tyrrhenian islands including Malta. Early Neolithic material from very small islands (e.g., Palagruža) is perhaps less to do with permanent settlement, and more to do with the spread of Impressed wares throughout the Adriatic. Small islands were most certainly visited in the Early Neolithic, particularly obsidian-bearing islands such as Pantelleria and Melos, but aside from their mineral resources, these dry, small, rocky islands were almost certainly very unattractive for Early Neolithic populations.

Eustatic (from glacial melt) and isostatic (from glacial rebound in northern Europe [Roberts 1989]) sea-level change have complicated the understanding of the configuration of the northern Mediterranean coast in the early and mid-Holocene, with both processes contributing to rising sea levels in the basin. The coastal plains of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, and of southern France, were considerably more extensive then than during the late Holocene, and this process has concealed an unknown portion of the total distribution of Neolithic sites.