High diversity in lifeways among early Caribbean inhabitants
The first settlers of the Caribbean have long been regarded as bands of highly mobile groups who subsisted exclusively by hunting, gathering, and fishing. In recent years, however, there has been increasing evidence for the cultivation of domesticated plants by early groups and a lower degree of mobility than expected.
A new study, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, shows a high degree of variability in subsistence strategies and mobility patterns between different groups, suggesting highly diverse lifestyles of the early inhabitants of the Caribbean.
Isotope analysis
The analysis of strontium and oxygen isotope ratios in a person's bones and teeth can provide information about their mobility, while carbon and nitrogen allow conclusions to be drawn about their diet. For the current study, the isotopic composition of bones and teeth from a total of 146 individuals from eight early precolonial sites (ca. 2200 BC to 1300 AD) from Cuba were compared.
The results show at least three different patterns of mobility which are associated with different dietary practices. This underscores that the early settlers of the Caribbean were not a single culturally or behaviorally homogeneous group. Rather, there was a great diversity of lifeways.
Jason Laffoon notes that ’the interpretive power of these methods and approaches is that they provide us direct insights into the individual life histories of people in the past.’
PastPorts project
The research was conducted by an international team of archaeologists and bioarchaeologists from Cuba, Canada, and the Netherlands. The study is part of the PastPorts project which aims to investigate human mobility in the Caribbean using an integrated isotopic approach to better understand the dynamics of past Caribbean societies.
The research was funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant led by Dr Yadira Chinique de Armas and, in part, by the PastPorts project, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with Dr Jason Laffoon as principal investigator.