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Abstract
Once considered a backwater of New World prehistory, the Caribbean has now emerged from the archaeological shadows as a critical region for answering a host of questions related to human population dispersal, Neotropical island adaptations, maritime subsistence, seafaring, island interaction networks, and the rise of social complexity, among many others. In this paper, I provide a review of: (1) what is currently known about the antiquity of Pre-Columbian colonization of the Caribbean using archaeological, biological, and oceanographic data; (2) how these data inform on the dispersal of what appear to be many different population movements through time; and (3) the subsequent adaptations (e.g., technological, subsistence, and economic) that took place across the islands after initial contact. Results of more than a century of research demonstrate that the Antilles were settled much earlier than once thought (ca. 7000 cal yr BP), in multiple waves that show strong linkages to South America, but possibly originated from more than one source location. Dispersal was patchy, with several intriguing chronological and spatial disparities that scholars are now investigating in more detail. Beginning ca. 2500 cal yr BP, and accelerating around 1500 cal yr BP, the frequent transport and exchange of goods, services, animals, plants, knowledge, and spiritual ideologies between the islands as well as mainland areas — particularly South America — testify to the interconnected nature of Pre-Columbian societies in the region. The use of more advanced analytical techniques, including ancient DNA, archaeobotany, stable isotopes, and various approaches to geochemical and mineralogical sourcing of artifacts, which until recently have been largely underused in the Caribbean, is opening new avenues of research that are creating exciting opportunities for examining ancient Amerindian lifeways.
Notes
1 In an earlier paper (Fitzpatrick Citation2004), I argued that archaeologists in the Caribbean were in many ways insular and too provincial, in part evidenced by the continued publication of research in conference proceedings published by the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology (IACA), which was not peer-reviewed and poorly or not accessible, and by the lack of publishing in more mainstream and high-impact journals. As Curet (Citation2004, 187) also noted, “[…] the relative isolation of the Caribbean in mainstream trends of world archaeology […] has limited the potential of Caribbean archaeology to the discipline […] [so that] the Caribbean in many ways can still be considered one of the backwaters of modern archaeology.” The fact that the Caribbean was rarely or never mentioned in standard introductory textbooks for archaeology and prehistory was also a testament to this problem, but this has slowly been remedied over the years.
2 The term “prehistoric” is firmly embedded in archaeology as a descriptor of time before the written record. This term has been rightly criticized for not always being entirely accurate given that “contact” with Europeans or other literate societies differed temporally and geographically, but also because it diminishes the importance of oral traditions in non-literate societies. In the Caribbean, the term prehistory is often replaced with one of several other terms, the most common of which has been “Pre-Columbian,” or the time prior to the arrival of Columbus in AD 1492. Other terms include “Pre-Hispanic” (i.e., before the Spanish) and “Pre-Colonial” (i.e., before European colonists). In this paper, I use the term Pre-Columbian as this seems more clearly indicative of the very first encounter, broadly speaking, between Europeans and native Caribbean island Amerindians. This event, and the multiple contacts that took place during and after Columbus’ first voyage, was pivotal in so many ways, setting the stage for what the historian Crosby (1972) famously called the “Columbian Exchange.” These initial contacts between Amerindians and Columbus and his crews across a large swath of the northern Antilles — from the Bahamas to Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Cuba, and later to much of the Lesser Antilles, northern South America, and Central America between AD 1493 and 1503 — involved numerous social and biological transmissions. These included communicable diseases that quickly began to decimate native groups who had no natural immunity to smallpox, measles, and many other pathogens, along with the transfer of Old World plants and animals that began to quickly and dramatically alter New World environments. The term “Pre-Hispanic” is not entirely useful, for while much of Columbus’ crew was Spanish, he himself was Genoese and subsequent voyages involved a host of different European nations that were continually engaged in commerce, conflict, and subjugation of native groups and Africans over a period of centuries. The term “Pre-Colonial” also infers the establishment of colonies, and while many Europeans did in fact establish outposts in the Caribbean and other parts of the New World beginning in the late 1400s, which later intensified in the 1500s and 1600s, not all contacts initially involved permanent settlement. In many cases, especially during the 16th century, islands were seen by explorers and occasionally visited to provision, trade, and interact with people, and/or drop off livestock to provide a source of food for later voyages. These contacts were not “colonial” at the outset, but did dramatically affect native Amerindian populations and fragile Caribbean island ecologies very quickly.
3 The Puerto Rico trench that extends between eastern Cuba and western Hispaniola is even deeper at around 8650 m (28,370 ft), though it is technically considered to be in the Atlantic Ocean.
4 For a list of the earliest acceptable radiocarbon dates for major islands in the Caribbean, see Giovas and Fitzpatrick (2014, 572–573).
5 Given a number of political and economic challenges in many places across the circum-Caribbean over the last 50 years, a large swath of the region remains understudied, particularly Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Colombia. Recent events in Cuba, for example, are encouraging and should provide more opportunities for Cuban and outside scholars to collaborate and share resources. Several new research projects in these areas are hopeful enterprises that will add tremendously to what is known about population origins and dispersals into and between the Caribbean islands.
6 The Caribbean's oft-used cultural-historical framework was developed by Rouse (e.g., Citation1960, Citation1972, Citation1977, Citation1992) using a “modal” approach, a hybrid of the McKern Midwestern Taxonomic System and Linnaean classification for biological organisms. This was primarily an effort to categorize pottery, which had various stylistic and manufacturing attributes and that typically derived from contexts that lacked clear stratigraphy (or stratigraphic integrity), into a decipherable spatial and chronological framework. Essentially, Rouse was attempting to assign peoples or cultures to a particular set of “modes” found in pottery (see Keegan Citation2010, 141) in an effort to discern their origin and relationship to other archaeological cultures. These were categorized in a hierarchical system based on these modes (specific attributes), series (a group of people sharing a substantial number of modes), subseries, and styles (see Curet Citation2004). In the Caribbean, a series is assigned an “-oid” after the name of the type site where it was first identified. For example, “Saladoid” is the name given to the first group of peoples who settled the Antilles during the Ceramic Age beginning around ca. 2500 cal yr BP after the Saladero site in Venezuela. A subseries, or “smaller geographical, chronological, and cultural units, intermediary between series and styles” (Curet Citation2004, 193) is given the “an” suffix, so “Cedrosan Saladoid”, named after the Cedros site on Trinidad, is a derivation of Saladoid culture. A style of Cedrosan Saladoid would represent “all of the pottery found within each people's spatial and temporal lines; in practice, styles represent both the ceramic assemblages and the people that created them” (Curet Citation2004, 193). While Rouse's classificatory-historical approach has been increasingly criticized for its underlying assumptions and convenient categories (e.g., Curet Citation2004; Keegan Citation2010; Rodríguez Ramos et al. Citation2010), the naming conventions continue to be widely used by scholars and are also referred to in this paper.
7 In recent years, it has become clear that the terms “Preceramic” or “Aceramic” are not sufficiently adequate to describe either the Lithic or Archaic age, given that: (1) these groups appear to have actually produced their own pottery (Keegan Citation2006; Rodríguez Ramos et al. Citation2008); and (2) in terms of Lithic groups, that they lacked ground stone technology, which is also disputed. Rodríguez Ramos et al. (Citation2008) have suggested (at least in terms of the ceramics found in the Antilles prior to Saladoid and Huecoid) that a more appropriate term for Lithic and/or Archaic groups in the Caribbean might be “Pre-Arawak,” emphasizing the dynamic nature and technological sophistication of societies before the inception of the Ceramic Age ca. 2500 cal yr BP.
8 The terms “Ciboney” or “Guanahatebey” have often been used to describe peoples from western Cuba observed at European contact who apparently practiced a more primitive non-agricultural, nomadic lifestyle. Keegan (1989) has challenged this claim, noting that permanent village sites have been found in these areas, and that some claims by the Spanish were likely dubious or erroneous. While this issue has still not been clarified, for the purposes of this paper, I use “Ciboney” in reference to scholarly papers that have used this term in the past.
9 The samples derive from three different sites: Perico I cave (n = 37), Mogote La Cueva (n = 3), and Canimar (n = 7). While all of these sites have associated radiocarbon ages, ranging from 1990 ± 50 14C yr BP, 1620 14C yr BP, and 4700 ± 70 14C yr BP, respectively, much of these data were recovered 40–50 years ago and the dates and/or excavation reports remain mostly unpublished. As such, it is unclear what kinds of samples were tested and whether these age ranges accurately reflect the age of the individuals whose mtDNA was sequenced. Given this chronological ambiguity, it would be useful to obtain direct dates from each specimen using more advanced pretreatment procedures for human bone.
10 This was something also noted by Siegel (Citation2013) in his review of 952 papers published in the Proceedings of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology (IACA) over the last 50 years, which focused primarily (27.2%) or secondarily (25.9%) on time–space systematics.
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Notes on contributors
Scott M. Fitzpatrick
Dr Scott M. Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. He is founder and co-editor of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology and specializes on the prehistoric settlement of islands in the Caribbean and Pacific.