Lesser Antilles

During the 4th millennium BC, the Caribbean part of the Atlantic Ocean witnessed the development of insular societies in
the Lesser Antilles archipelago. These communities which combined shellfish collection, fishing, submarine and terrestrial hunting, a
possible proto-agriculture and gathering, developed a culture there rather specific to the tropical insular context. For this period, the
typology of the deposits and of the material productions, patterns in the exploitation of alimentary resources and of raw materials as
well as patterns in the territorial settlement, show that the natural environment had an influence on the lifestyle and organization of
these populations. Their social structure seems to be based on a cyclic system of exploitation of resources, shaped according to their
availability and to socio-economic necessities as well as to the needs of their symbolic world. The notion of archaeoecology presented
here comes from that of ethnoecology which analyses the interactions between humans and their natural environment with historical,
sociocultural and ecological perspectives. The concept of archaeoecology is used in this work in order to examine the past interactions
between the maritime hunter-gatherers of the Lesser Antilles, their activities and their environment. The palaeo-environments are
considered in a widely accepted way that is including living species, ecosystems and their evolutions, climatic conditions and their
variations. If it appears quite obvious that the natural environment partly influenced these societies, this aspect is even more distinct in
the very specific insular context of the Caribbean.
The island of Saint-Martin, localized in the Northern Lesser Antilles, offers a privileged field for this study. Indeed, it concentrates about a
third of the Archaic Age sites that are attested by absolute dates in the Lesser Antilles. The archipelago spreads over more than 1 000 km,
from Trinidad in the South to the Virgin Islands in the North, and thirty-seven Archaic Age sites have been, to this point, listed as far North
as the island of Vieques, south-east of Puerto Rico. The case of Saint-Martin, which yielded twelve out of these thirty-seven sites, allows
to examine, on a small territory, the sites’ settlement pattern, their formation and taphonomic evolution, and, in particular, the deterioration
parameters of the shell deposits. Little developed on a vertical scale in Saint-Martin, these shell deposits appear to result from the combination
of cyclic human settlements and stormy episodes bringing marine sand deposits which separate the successive discarding events in
the same spot or destroy them, especially during cyclonic episodes. A diachronic and detailed study of the settlements over close to four
millennia allows detecting an evolution in the human practices although they appear quite homogeneous at first sight. The global analysis
of all available parameters reveals a strong interaction of the trio: humans, activities and environment. Indeed, the origin of the raw materials
exploited in the industries and of the fauna which was consumed at the sites, show that these populations have a thorough knowledge
of the resources specific to each island of archipelago. These aspects suggest that the communities were highly mobile, moving from an
island ton another according to their needs and in adaptation to the availability and seasonality of some of these resources. The means of
subsistence are mostly based on the collecting of shellfish and, to a smaller extent, of crustaceans. The consuming of fish, mostly taken
from nearby reefs, is attested but it is difficult to evaluate its representation in the diet of the Archaic Age communities given the rarity of
bones found at the sites, probably as a result of differential preservation problems. Given the high occurrence of known littoral sites, all in
all quite coherent for nomadic navigators, it appears that these communities thus preferentially settled on the coast while they spent time
as well inland where terrestrial fauna then appears to be targeted.
Most of the activities registered at the sites are related to meat-based alimentation which seems to have conditioned the choice of places
to settle quite systematically, according to the settings of the collecting zones. Cooking and consumption were also taking place at the
settlements. The production and use of tools, attested by the debitage and shaping of stone, shell, and coral, are, in most cases, combined
with alimentary activities. Meanwhile, some sites have a more specific, more technical purpose and clearly stand as workshop
sites. Practices of a symbolic dimension are sometimes identified through, for example, unusual stone tools which aren’t functional a
priori. All these activities are also witnessed by human laying out: various types of firing, cooking and consuming zones, clusters where
the shells, mostly the queen conch (Lobatus gigas), were exploited for the making of tools, objects deposits in pits and empty areas
suggesting the presence of huts installed during bivouacs.
One of the special features of the Archaic Age settlements of Saint-Martin is the reoccupation of some of them, for hundreds or thousands
of years. This phenomenon appears to be directly led to by the communities’ lifestyle which establish themselves on the places
where they can find the resources they need. The results on the island of Saint-Martin allow defining the social profile of the Archaic
Age communities, that is highly mobile and nomadic populations that travel around using canoes over long distances. These data, compared
to those collected in the rest of the Lesser Antilles confirm and add to the so far understood pattern. Thus, the archaeoecology of
the Archaic Age populations of the Lesser Antilles reveals a relative symbiosis between humans, their activities and the environment.
This fragile balance for communities interdependent with the natural environment witnesses to a rather precarious lifestyle which will
be progressively discontinued in favour of semi-sedentary settlements at the end of the Archaic Age period. Meanwhile, the migration
of farmer-potter communities around the end of the 1st millennium BC leads to the disappearing of the Archaic Age populations in the
Lesser Antilles, integrated with the new societies or pushed away in the Greater Antilles where they lasted longer.

This paper is based on field research on the islands of Barbuda and Montserrat, and on published crop lists from a range of Caribbean locales. It identifies the core crops and gardening techniques that prevail in Caribbean subsistence gardens despite differences in elevation, rainfall, and underlying geology.  It was a cooperative project between an anthropologist, Riva Berleant, and a geographer, Lydia Pulsipher.

To identify oxygen isotope (δ 18 O) values and associated sea-surface temperature (SST) in the northern Caribbean , 82 δ 18 O values from 3 modern and 11 prehistoric Donax denticulatus shells were sampled. First, we conducted X-ray diffraction (XRD) on several modern shells to confirm aragonite composition. After identifying the biomineralogical composition of the shell, we applied several δ 18 O-to-SST conversion equations and selected the most appropriate formula based on pairing modern isotopic data with SST during the time of collection. We then converted prehistoric isotopic values to SST estimates to reconstruct paleo-SST for nearshore waters off the island of Nevis in the northern Lesser Antilles. Our results indicate that prehistoric isotopic signatures are slightly more depleted than modern signatures, with estimated SST similar to modern conditions for the region. Our study demonstrates the potential for Donax denticulatus to serve as a reliable proxy for recording ambient SST and reconstructing local paleoecology of nearshore environments, important for examining a host of issues related to prehistoric settlement and island adaptations.