Human arrival and landscape dynamics in the northern Bahamas

The first Caribbean settlers were Amerindians from South America. Great Abaco and Grand Bahama, the final islands colonized in the northernmost Bahamas, were inhabited by the Lucayans when Europeans arrived. The timing of Lucayan arrival in the northern Bahamas has been uncertain because direct archaeological evidence is limited. We document Lucayan arrival on Great Abaco Island through a detailed record of vegetation, fire, and landscape dynamics based on proxy data from Blackwood Sinkhole. From about 3,000 to 1,000 y ago, forests dominated by hardwoods and palms were resilient to the effects of hurricanes and cooling sea surface temperatures. The arrival of Lucayans by about 830 CE (2σ range: 720 to 920 CE) is demarcated by increased burning and followed by landscape disturbance and a time-transgressive shift from hardwoods and palms to the modern pine forest. Considering that Lucayan settlements in the southern Bahamian archipelago are dated to about 750 CE (2σ range: 600 to 900 CE), these results demonstrate that Lucayans spread rapidly through the archipelago in less than 100 y. Although precontact landscapes would have been influenced by storms and climatic trends, the most pronounced changes follow more directly from landscape burning and ecosystem shifts after Lucayan arrival. The pine forests of Abaco declined substantially between 1500 and 1670 CE, a period of increased regional hurricane activity, coupled with fires on an already human-impacted landscape. Any future intensification of hurricane activity in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean threatens the sustainability of modern pine forests in the northern Bahamas.

The paleoecology and extinction of endemic tortoises in the Bahamian Archipelago

No native species of tortoises ( Chelonoidis spp.) live today in the Bahamian (Lucayan) Archipelago (= The Bahamas + The Turks and Caicos Islands), although a number of species inhabited these islands at the first human contact in the late-Holocene. Until their extinction, tortoises were the largest terrestrial herbivores in the island group. We report 16 accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon (14C) dates determined directly on individual bones of indigenous, extinct tortoises from the six Bahamian islands (Abaco, Eleuthera, Flamingo Cay, Crooked, Middle Caicos, Grand Turk) on five different carbonate banks. These 16 specimens probably represent six or seven species of tortoises, although only one ( Chelonoidis alburyorum on Abaco) has been described thus far. Tortoises seem to have survived on most Bahamian islands for only one or two centuries after initial human settlement, which took place no earlier than AD ~700–1000. The exception is Grand Turk, where we have evidence from the Coralie archeological site that tortoises survived for approximately three centuries after human arrival, based on stratigraphically associated 14C dates from both tortoise bones and wood charcoal. The stable isotope values of carbon (σ13C) and nitrogen (σ15N) of dated tortoise fossils show a NW-to-SE trend in the archipelago that may reflect increasing aridity and more consumption of cactus.

Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean

Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean examines the diversity of living environments that the enslaved inhabitants of the colonial Caribbean by analyzing archaeological evidence collected from a wide variety of sites across the region. Archaeological investigations of domestic architecture and artifacts illuminate the nature of household organization; fundamental changes in settlement patterns; and the manner in which power was invariably linked with the material arrangements of space among the enslaved living and working in a variety of contexts throughout the region, including plantations, fortifications, and urban centers. While research in the region has provided a considerable amount of data at the household-level, much of this work is biased towards artifact analysis, resulting in unfamiliarity with the considerations that went into constructing and inhabiting households. The chapters in this book provide detailed reconstructions of the built environments associated with slavery and account for the cultural behaviors and social arrangements that shaped these spaces. It brings together case studies of Caribbean slave settlements through historical archaeology as a means of exposing the diversity of people and practices in these various landscapes, across the British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles as well as the Bahamian archipelago.

Diffuse Versus Conduit Flow in Coastal Karst Aquifers: The Consequences of Island Area and Perimeter Relationships

The majority of limestone islands are made of eogenetic carbonate rock, with intrinsic high porosity and permeability. The freshwater lenses of small islands are dominated by diffuse flow regimes as the island perimeter is everywhere close to the meteoric catchment of the island interior. This flow regime produces flank margin caves at the lens margin, where dissolution is enhanced by mixing corrosion, superposition of organic decay horizons and higher flow velocities as the lens thins. The lens interior develops touching-vug flow systems that result in enhanced permeability and lens thinning over time. As islands become larger, the area (meteoric catchment) goes up by the square, but the island perimeter (discharge zone) goes up linearly; diffuse flow becomes inefficient; conduit flow develops to produce traditional epigenic cave systems that discharge the freshwater lens by specific turbulent flow routes, which in turn are fed by diffuse flow in the island interior. Locally, diffuse flow to the island perimeter continues in coastal proximal areas between major conduit flow routes to produce flank margin caves. The Bahamian Archipelago represents a case history in which tectonics is limited, the rocks are entirely eogenetic and the diffuse to conduit flow transition is demonstrated.

Absence of Saharan dust influence on the strontium isotope ratios on modern trees from the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands

We report on strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isotope results from 91 modern trees growing on the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands. The average87Sr/86Sr ratio of 0.709169±0.000010 is consistent with the late Quaternary limestone of the islands and with the modern ocean value. The absence of any detectable influence of87Sr-enriched Saharan dust is notable, given the known contribution of this material to both past and recent soils of the Caribbean. Our results indicate that the impact of Saharan dust to the modern biosphere of the Bahamian archipelago is at least an order of magnitude less than modeled in currently available strontium isoscapes for the circum-Caribbean. We suggest that the bioavailability of Sr in Saharan dust may be considerably less than previously thought. Nevertheless, further work could usefully be carried out in the Bahamian archipelago on plants with different rooting depths, growing on different soil types and on limestone of different ages. Our results have particular relevance for the refinement of existing strontium isoscapes and the archaeological provenience of artifacts, animals, and people in the circum-Caribbean.

Origin, paleoecology, and extirpation of bluebirds and crossbills in the Bahamas across the last glacial–interglacial transition

On low islands or island groups such as the Bahamas, surrounded by shallow oceans, Quaternary glacial–interglacial changes in climate and sea level had major effects on terrestrial plant and animal communities. We examine the paleoecology of two species of songbirds (Passeriformes) recorded as Late Pleistocene fossils on the Bahamian island of Abaco—the Eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis) and Hispaniolan crossbill (Loxia megaplaga). Each species lives today only outside of the Bahamian Archipelago, with S. sialis occurring in North and Central America and L. megaplaga endemic to Hispaniola. Unrecorded in the Holocene fossil record of Abaco, both of these species probably colonized Abaco during the last glacial interval but were eliminated when the island became much smaller, warmer, wetter, and more isolated during the last glacial–interglacial transition from ∼15 to 9 ka. Today’s warming temperatures and rising sea levels, although not as great in magnitude as those that took place from ∼15 to 9 ka, are occurring rapidly and may contribute to considerable biotic change on islands by acting in synergy with direct human impacts.