Sidestone Press Early Settlers of the Insular Caribbean: Dearchaizing the Archaic

Early Settlers of the Insular Caribbean: Dearchaizing the Archaic offers a comprehensive coverage of the most recent advances in interdisciplinary research on the early human settling of the Caribbean islands. It covers the time span of the so-called Archaic Age and focuses on the Middle to Late Holocene period which – depending on specific case studies discussed in this volume – could range between 6000 BC and AD 1000. A similar approach to the early settlers of the Caribbean islands has never been published in one volume, impeding the realization of a holistic view on indigenous peoples’ settling, subsistence, movements, and interactions in this vast and naturally diversified macroregion. Delivered by a panel of international experts, this book provides recent and new data in the fields of archaeology, collection studies, palaeobotany, geomorphology, paleoclimate and bioarchaeology that challenge currently existing perspectives on early human settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, migration routes and mobility and exchange. This publication compiles new approaches to ‘old’ data and museum collections, presents the results of starch grain analysis, paleocoring, seascape modelling, and network analysis. Moreover, it features newer published data from the islands such as Margarita and Aruba. All the above-mentioned data compiled in one volume fills the gap in scholarly literature, transforms some of the interpretations in vogue and enables the integration of the first settlers of the insular Caribbean into the larger Pan-American perspective. This book not only provides scholars and students with compelling new and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Early Settlers of the Insular Caribbean. It is also of interest to unspecialized readers as it discusses subjects related to archaeology, anthropology, and – broadly speaking – to the intersections between humanities and social and environmental sciences, which are of great interest to the present-day general public. From the Publisher Corinne L. Hofman is Professor of Caribbean Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, the Netherlands. She has conducted fieldwork – together with Dr. Menno Hoogland – in many of the Caribbean islands over the past 30 years. Her research and publications are highly multi-disciplinary and major themes of interest center around mobility and exchange, colonial encounters, inter-cultural dynamics, settlement archaeology, artefact analyses, and provenance studies. Her projects are designed to contribute to the historical awareness, preservation and valorization of indigenous heritage. Hofman has obtained numerous research grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), and the European Research Council (ERC), as well as prestigious prizes. She is the PI of the NWO-Island Networks project and the ERC-Synergy NEXUS1492 project. She is the author of many articles, book chapters and edited volumes on Caribbean archaeology. Her two most recent books are Managing our Past into the Future (with Jay B. Haviser), Sidestone Press 2015 and The Caribbean Before Columbus (with William F. Keegan), Oxford University Press 2017.Dr. Andrzej T. Antczak is Associate Professor of Caribbean Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Since 1982, he has been co-directing―together with Dr. Marlena Antczak―pioneering archaeological investigations on more than 60 off-shore islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean and, since 2006, on the small islands off the eastern coast of Martinique. His scholarly interests include the pre-colonial and early colonial archaeology of the Southeastern Caribbean, theory and method in the study of the social past, materiality, non-western ontologies, community archaeology, collection studies, archaeometry, shell middens, and historical ecology. His books include: Los Idolos de las