The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series)
William F. Keegan
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 081301137X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
samples from archaeological sites in the vicinity of flamingo ponds, the possible prehistoric use of these birds cannot be excluded. A final animal was introduced by the Lucayans. During his first voyage Columbus reported seeing dogs (Canis familiaris). Recently dog bones Page 40 were recovered from a prehistoric context during the excavation of site MC12 on Middle Caicos. Dogs may have been used for hunting hutia, iguana, and flamingo,
that local resources simply are not worth fighting over in view of the higher returns from longdistance trading, raiding, hunting, and fishing. In either of these circumstances, or in some combination of them, interpersonal aggression may occur, but leaders will act to prevent it from escalating into violence because internal warfare is in no one's interest. To a large degree, political institutions arise from the structures that initially operated to organize the productive and reproductive
Recent excavations at the Delectable Bay settlement complex on Acklins Island provide evidence for longdistance exchange that exceeded by several magnitudes the scale of exchange in the remainder of the Bahamas (Keegan 1988). In the Delectable Bay site, AC14, 27.3 percent by weight of the pottery assemblage was imported from the Greater Antilles. In comparison, Sears and Sullivan (1978) have reported that imported pottery comprises less than 1 percent of the ceramic
Even where such specificity is possible, it will be of limited use if we are unable to determine the degree to which the optimal diet accurately characterizes prehistoric subsistence behavior. Unfortunately, direct archaeological tests of theoretical predictions are often limited by preservational biases and the limits of inferential
population was doubled to account for the unsurveyed south coast of Crooked Island; 42 percent of Mayaguana and 84 percent of Great Inagua were apparently unsuited for settlement. Page 170 any less densely occupied than the islands for which survey data are available. The purpose of this exercise was to determine whether known sites could reasonably account for a total population of 40,000. The conclusion is that they can when