This post has been generated by a human.
“…it is clear that all humans impact their environment in some fashion and that smaller groups generally have less of an impact than larger ones”. Fitzpatrick & Keegan (2007, page 30)
In my previous post in my series on the humanization of the Caribbean Sea I traced the origins and migrations of the first humans—Archaic Age people who fashioned tools out of stone—to settle the vast, island-filled tropical marine system that we now call the Caribbean Sea.
In this post I examine how these prehistoric settlers adapted to living on islands that, until their arrival, had never experienced any form of human influence, and how their activities began to alter the natural landscapes and surrounding seascapes of these islands over thousands of years.
Feasting on Megafauna
Paleontological studies of the timing of mammalian extinctions on the islands of the Greater Antilles (see map in my previous post) reveal that the first humans would have encountered a lost Pleistocene wonderland of large mammals dwelling in the natural forests that covered their newly discovered homes. These people must have been delighted to find that there was plenty of readily available food on hand in the form of megafauna (literally, “large animals”) whose relatives were extinct on the mainland for at least 4,000 years. Large, 200-kilogram ground sloths were an important component of this terrestrial megafauna.
Humans and sloths co-existed for the next 1,000 years or so on these island refugia but, just as happened much earlier on the mainland, the human arrivals eventually drove the sloths to extinction. They hunted them using the weaponry of the day—large projectile points fashioned from stone, bone, and shell hafted to spears. The loss of their habitat as humans started to burn forests to clear land for cultivation further contributed to the demise of the sloths.
Unsurprisingly, given their capability to kill large land animals, these first people also set about exploiting the megafauna living in the adjacent pristine ocean for food and other uses. Archaeological investigations at one of the oldest Archaic Age settlements discovered in the Caribbean thus far—a 6,000 year old site in Cuba consisting of a simple rock shelter at the base of a limestone cliff that is now about two kilometres from the ocean—have uncovered animal remains that show that the inhabitants were quite capable of hunting manatees (weighing 500 kilograms or more), green sea turtles (160 kg or more), and the now extinct Caribbean monk seal (200 kg or more).
Manatee remains dating to the Archaic Age have also been found on the islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Antigua, Carriacou, Guadeloupe and Martinique (see map in my previous post), evidence that manatees were hunted by prehistoric settlers throughout the Caribbean. In the natural coastal marine environment of the time, these slow-moving animals would have been numerous and easily hunted from canoes using spears. Green sea turtles would also have been abundant. They were speared or entangled with nets on their seagrass feeding grounds, and females were captured while laying their eggs on nearby nesting beaches. There is also archaeological evidence that Archaic Age settlers in Hispaniola hunted whales and crocodiles, the latter weighing in at over 900 kilograms.
Exploiting a Diversity of Ocean Resources
Ocean megafauna would have been a very important resource for the Archaic Age settlers on account of their natural abundance and the significant quantities of meat and usable by-products that each animal provided. For example, a single manatee would yield many kilograms of lean meat and fat, as well as hide and bone that could be fashioned into a variety of ceremonial objects and useful implements, such as fishing weights.
The remains of large quantities of a remarkable diversity of marine invertebrates and fish have also been identified and quantified at numerous Archaic Age sites across the Greater and Lesser Antilles. It’s clear that Archaic Age people exploited all coastal marine habitats for just about anything that was edible or useful in some way.
We know that they foraged for molluscs such as West Indian top shells, turkey wing clams, and nerite gastropods in the rocky intertidal and shallow subtidal; waded in seagrass beds for conchs, including the large queen conch which they used for food and for making tools; harvested oysters from mangrove forests and many other kinds of clams from shallow sandy and muddy bottoms; fished squirrelfish, grouper, parrotfish, snappers, grunts, wrasse, surgeonfish, triggerfish, porcupine fish and many other fish species from coral reefs; caught sharks, rays, jacks, barracuda, bream, and dolphins in inshore waters; and fished for needlefish, flying fish, and tuna in deeper pelagic waters. Clearly, the breadth of their use of ocean resources for food was remarkable and makes the typical seafood diet of people in today’s world pale in comparison.
Effective Application of Traditional Fishing Knowledge
Archaic Age settlers of the Caribbean islands had the technical know-how to efficiently exploit the ocean resources at their doorstep. They employed sophisticated practices that made clever use of natural materials to harvest seafood. Reef fish were caught in traps made of wood and palm fibre; poisons extracted from the bark and roots of trees such as the ‘fish killing’ tree, Piscidia carthagenensis, were released in quiet lagoons to stun fish; larger fish were caught with hook and line, the hooks made from tree thorns, turtle carapace, sharpened bone and animal teeth, and the line from plant fibres; schooling fish were caught using fine-gauge nets constructed from plant fibres, with the top edge of the net held up with wood floats and the bottom edge weighted down with sinkers made of pottery discs and stones; and fish pots consisting of a basket constructed with interwoven lianas were used to catch fish.
The Strombus Line—An Example of Large-Scale Extraction of an Ocean Resource in the Archaic Age
A remarkable shell midden on the southwestern shore of the island of Barbuda in the northern Lesser Antilles reveals a great deal about just how specialized ocean extraction activities had become during the Archaic Age, and how rich the pickings were. This midden dates back over 3,000 years and is at least 3 kilometres long, although it would have been much longer originally, perhaps an impressive 8 or 9 kilometres; in places it is up to 30 metres wide and forms a distinctive bulge on the otherwise flat terrain.
This structure is replete with the remains of queen conch shells collected from the adjacent seagrass meadows, hence its name the Strombus Line, derived from a previous genus name—Strombus— for the queen conch. The queen conch (now named Aliger gigas) is the largest gastropod found in the Caribbean—up to 30 centimetres long, 20 centimetres wide and weighing over 2 kilograms. It would have been a very important resource for prehistoric Caribbean people—a large queen conch yields more than a third of a kilogram of meat with an average sized animal containing about 150 grams of meat; furthermore, the thick, flared lip of the shell was ideal for making tools such as chisels, axes, adzes, and points for spears.
When archaeologists analyzed the shell fragments excavated from a single square metre of the Strombus Line they found it contained close to 1,000 individual queen conchs which would have yielded about 150 kilograms of meat. When they extrapolated this finding over a 10-metre wide by 800-metre-long section of the midden they calculated that this represented a yield of over 600 tonnes of conch meat, or about 700 kilograms of meat harvested annually over the approximately 865 years that the site was occupied. And this is from only one 800 metre segment of the midden. If the intact midden was an estimated 9 kilometres long, then the annual harvest may have been in the order of 7 to 8 tonnes of queen conch meat.
Conjure the image of a group of prehistoric people wading in a shallow, natural, and hugely productive seagrass meadow more than 3,000 years ago. They are gathering queen conchs present in what we would now consider to be unbelievable numbers. Some are lugging the heavy shells to the beach where they are extracting the meat and then piling the empty shells onto the adjacent, ever-expanding Strombus Line where the best shells are being picked over at leisure by experienced tool makers. Others are carrying the meat further inland where they are preserving it by drying, salting, or smoking.
This scene represents specialized marine extraction at a protoindustrial scale of tens of thousands of conchs harvested per year. Given the scale of the operation it is likely that most of the meat acquired and some of the best shells were transported by canoe for trade with neighbouring islands.
Potential for Human Modification of Natural Marine Ecosystems in the Archaic Age
A consistent theme based on the archaeological investigations carried out thus far on Caribbean islands is that the original prehistoric settlers of these islands made extensive use of ocean resources. The remains of large quantities of a remarkable diversity of marine animals, large and small, have been discovered at numerous Archaic Age sites across the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The people occupying these settlements were clearly hunting, foraging, and fishing in natural marine habitats that, from our 21st century perspective, were unimaginably diverse and bountiful.
These prehistoric human colonists possessed the knowledge and tools to readily exploit these rich ocean resources. In an ecological sense, they represented an invasion of the pristine, insular Caribbean ocean by an intelligent, highly adaptable, and predatory alien species, in effect, a novel keystone species. They hunted terrestrial megafauna to the point of extinction and carried over this ability to the hunting of ocean megafauna. They also harvested a remarkable diversity of marine fish and invertebrates, sometimes in very large quantities.
To what extent did the hunting, foraging, and fishing way of life practiced by these Stone Age human societies alter the natural coastal ocean ecosystems of their island homes over the course of the 4,500-year span of the Caribbean Archaic Age?
There will always be uncertainty around this kind of question given we are evaluating changes that occurred in the remote past based largely on the fossilized remnants of prehistoric food gathering activities. It’s not so surprising then that the impact of prehistoric hunting on populations of Caribbean Ocean megafauna, such as monk seals, manatees, whales, and dolphins, remains controversial among Caribbean archaeologists and historians. There is a school of thought that, because the remains of such animals are relatively rare at archaeological sites, prehistoric people avoided hunting them because they had not developed technologies, such as harpoons, to dependably kill them. It has also been suggested that they had no need to hunt them because other seafood was abundant. Or that there may have been cultural taboos in some communities on eating certain species, such as manatees.
Such speculation seems designed to defend the oft held notion that prehistoric people could not possibly have altered populations of large ocean animals in any significant way. I find it hard to believe, however, that these prehistoric island settlers were not capable and motivated enough to put a full range of ocean megafauna on the menu. After all, their mainland ancestors had the technology to hunt the land megafauna of South America to extinction thousands of years earlier, and the first island settlers did the same with the giant sloths that they encountered. Why would they stop at sloths when there was an ocean full of many other kinds of large, tasty animals at their doorstep?
It is also important to understand that it is astonishing that any remains of ocean megafauna killed by prehistoric Caribbean island settlers have been found at all. The activity took place thousands of years ago, most likely by small groups of hunters at seasonally occupied sites, mostly now lost to natural and human-caused events. Furthermore, initial preservation of remains would have been rare, particularly if the animals were butchered on the beach, with the remains left to scavengers and the sea to remove. The evidence would thus be extremely sparse, scattered widely, and mostly lost. Nonetheless, ancient remains of ocean megafauna have been discovered at many settlement sites throughout the Caribbean suggesting that the hunting of large ocean animals was widespread and intensive and likely impacted local populations of such animals. Manatees, in particular, would have made large tempting targets and were likely widely hunted, perhaps to the extent that isolated populations were eliminated on some islands of the Lesser Antilles in the prehistoric era.
Furthermore, as I recounted earlier in this post, archaeological investigations demonstrate that Archaic Age settlers of the Caribbean islands exploited a great diversity of ocean fish and invertebrates in addition to megafauna. And there is evidence that, at some locations at least, this activity was specialized and intensive and took place over many hundreds of years, as shown by the work of archaeologists investigating the extensive Strombus Line midden on Barbuda. I think it unlikely that harvesting queen conch at such a scale over such a long period would not have significantly impacted the structure and dynamics of the natural, pre-human queen conch population. Also, the burning and clearance of forests by the earliest settlers could well have increased freshwater, nutrient and sediment runoff to the pristine seagrass beds, resulting in degradation and loss of the natural seagrass habitat, and associated impacts on queen conch abundance.
Given all this, I believe we can safely reject the notion that the footprint of these first prehistoric settlers of the Caribbean islands was too light to significantly impact the ocean environment of their new island homes. The evidence to hand suggests otherwise. Like humans everywhere, these earliest prehistoric settlers of the insular Caribbean were agents of change. Wherever they showed up, their activities altered the ocean environment in some way, bearing in mind that the extent and pace of their impacts would have been related to their population size, with smaller groups having less of an impact than larger ones.
The Second Wave—The Arrival of Ceramic Age Settlers
The Caribbean archipelago remained the realm of Archaic Age people until about 2,500 years ago when a second wave of migrants with a distinctly different culture began to disperse into the Caribbean Sea from South America; they largely replaced the original inhabitants and their way of life.
These new colonizers were pottery-making farmers known as Ceramic Age people. They colonized new islands, became more populous, lived in numerous permanent villages of substantial size generally sited within striking distance of the coast, and practiced horticulture and agriculture at much larger scale than their predecessors.
In my next post I will discuss the role of these people in the ongoing story of the alteration of the Caribbean Sea by human agency.
Some References
Balée, W., & Erickson, C. L. (2006). Time, complexity, and historical ecology. In W. Balée, & C. L. Erickson (Eds.), Time and complexity in historical ecology: Studies in the neotropical lowlands (pp. 1-20). New York: Columbia University Press. DOI: 10.1007/s10745-007-9148-z
Debrot, A. O., van Buurt, G., Caballero, A., & Antczak, A. (2006). A historical review of records of the West Indian manatee and the American crocodile in the Dutch Antilles. Caribbean Jounral of Science, 42(2), 272-280.
Cooke, S. B., Davalos, L. M., Mychajliw, A. M., Turvey, S. T., & Upham, N. s. (2017). Anthropogenic extinction dominates Holocene declines of West Indian mammals. Annaul Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 48, 301-327. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110316-022754
Fitzpatrick, S. M. (2015). The pre-Columbian Caribbean: colonization, populations dispersal, and island adaptations. PaleoAmerica, 1(4), 305-331. DOI: 10.1179/2055557115Y.0000000010
Fitzpatrick, S. M., & Keegan, W. F. (2007). Human impacts and adaptations in the Caribbean Islands: an historical ecology approach. Earth and Environmental Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 98, 29-45.DOI: 10.1017/S1755691007000096 (See particularly page 36)
Mckillop, H. (1985). Prehistoric exploitation of the manatee in the Maya and circum-Caribbean area. World Archaeology, 16, 337-353. DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1985.9979939
Newsom, L. A., & Wing, E. S. (2004). On land and sea: native American uses of biological resources in the West Indies. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Price, R. (1966). Caribbean fishing and fishermen: a historical sketch. American Anthropologist, 68, 1363-1383.
Rouse, I. (1992). The Tainos: rise and decline of the people who greeted Columbus. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press (see page 58).
Rousseau, V., Bain, A., Chabot, J., Grouard, S., & Perdikaris, S. (2017). The role of Barbuda in settlement of the Leeward Islands: Lithic and shell analysis along the Strombus Line shell midden. Journal of Caribbean Archaeology, 17, 1-25.
Veloz Maggiolo, M. (1991). Panorama historico del Caribe Precolombino. Santa Domingo, Dominacan Republic: Edicion del Banoco Central de la Republica Dominicana (See page 101).
Wilson, S. M. (2007). The Archaeology of the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.