EAA 2022: Abstract

The Late Ceramic Age (AD 600 – 1500) of the Caribbean is characterized by the emergence of new material cultures, migration and colonization, the widespread use of pottery, and the establishment of sedentary agricultural settlements. On the island of Hispaniola (modern day Dominican Republic and Haiti), new population centers emerged with palaeobotanical evidence suggesting that indigenous peoples were actively altering the landscape, likely due to slash-and-burn farming practices that facilitated the cultivation of a wide variety of domesticated plants. Notably, indigenous peoples did not rely upon domesticated animals as a food source, leading to their designation as hunter-fishers horticulturalists. There is however evidence suggesting that some animal species, in particularly a group of endemic Capromyd rodents known collectively as hutias, may have been managed by indigenous peoples, both based on their ubiquity at archaeological sites and due to evidence of human translocations of hutias from Hispaniola to other islands. This study follows from previous isotopic and zooarchaeological investigation into human-hutia relations, but applies a Bayesian dietary mixing model, Food Reconstruction Using Isotopic Transferred Signals (FRUITS), to differentiate between the dietary contributions of wild and domesticated plant food sources. Our aim is to establish the degree of human involvement in animal dietary behavior by establishing the relative dietary contributions of domesticated plants versus wild plants for several mammal species recovered from four indigenous sites in Hispaniola. Here we discuss: the utility of dietary mixing models to distinguish between ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ plant food sources; our methodology that was specifically catered for herbivorous ‘wild’ animals compared to isotopic foodwebs curated for human isotope studies; the advantages and limitations of FRUITS and other dietary mixing models for studying human-animal interactions; and finally our results from the trial of three different food source models in FRUITS.

isotopic analysis, Bayesian dietary mixing models, animal management, foodwebs, Caribbean archaeology

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Gene Shev¹

Jason Laffoon¹