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The Caribbean Antilles have been home to a kaleidoscopic series of human societies since 4000 b.c. To most people, the very word ‘Antilles’ summons up visions of heavily jungled, mountainous islands jutting from sapphire seas under azure skies, lulled by the waves which lap their sandy shores, or of serene low-lying atoll-like isles, their beaches covered in forests of swaying coconut palms. Those from less fortunate climes have looked at the Antilles as they looked at the Paci¤c, as Edens, in which staying alive is the simplest of endeavors and in which work as work is an alien concept. The stepping-stone arc of the Antilles, spanning the eastern Caribbean from Venezuela to Florida, does have some of the most ruggedly mountainous rain forests on earth as well as some of the world’s most beautiful beaches, and the outsider’s vision is indeed geographically and environmentally accurate, but the rest of the vision is woefully off the mark, for Antillean peoples, again like the peoples of the Paci¤c islands, have found their homeland bene¤cent at times and fraught with the usual dangers of everyday life at others. Geography has played a role in forging the fabric of Antillean life, but, as elsewhere, it has been the human factor which has framed the events of history. Crucial to a de¤nition of history is language, one of the most obvious facets of all human lifeways, for all our thoughts and deeds are, sooner or later, expressed and implemented verbally. Any approach to portrayal of a people, who they are and where they came from, must eventually take into account the language they use, its nature, its structure, and its source and development, but the approach must also take into account the customs and mores the people exhibit and the artifacts they make. We can describe the artifacts dispassionately , and we can through archaeology de¤ne the ways in which they are distributed in space and time, gaining a vast amount of inferential information about the implementation of the customs which underlie such artifactual activity . But artifactual data is usually not enough in itself to provide a full pic1 The Pre-Columbian Antilles An Overview of Research and Sources ture of a people’s lifeways, particularly if those people no longer exist or have been so changed through the passage of time that they no longer practice the lifeways they once had. This is the situation in the Caribbean Antilles, for though the lifeblood of earlier peoples does indeed ®ow through the veins of present-day Antillean peoples, with rare exceptions their earlier cultures and languages have disappeared over the passage of time, and it is not possible to extrapolate from the present toward the prehistoric past. Generations of historians, ethnohistorians , and archaeologists have worked toward a de¤nition and description of the pre-Columbian peoples of the Antilles, using documentary evidence from the period of initial contact between the native peoples and Europeans and the large amounts of data gathered laboriously by the spade from archaeological sites. The emergent picture is increasingly more re¤ned and focused, and it will become yet more so in the future, but relying on ethnohistoric and archaeological data alone still allows some of the more puzzling problems of lifeway characterization and explanation to persist. Among these problems is that of origin—where did the peoples of the Antilles come from, and when and how did they reach their ultimate island destinations ? Once there, how did they interact with one another, and why did they interact in the ways that they did? Archaeological and ethnohistorical data have given us partial answers and some very good hints, but language data has only rarely been brought to bear, and professional linguists have only infrequently coupled their knowledge and data with that of archaeologists, ethnologists, and historians, for until recently fewer than half a dozen linguists have been interested in that part of the world, and only two archaeologists practicing in the Caribbean arena have purposely trained themselves in the niceties of both archaeological and linguistic data-gathering, synthesis, and analysis. The same is, of course, true of many other parts of the world, but the fact of the presentday academic separation of the subdisciplines of anthropology does affect problem-resolution in instances of this kind. There is a great need today both for closer cooperation between ethnologists, linguists, and archaeologists in the examination of no longer extant societies and for cross...

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