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Our aim in writing this book is to present data derived from studies of plant and animal remains from archaeological sites in the West Indies and to use these data to better understand life on these islands in the past. The data that form the basis of this study come from an array of archaeological sites that span the times of occupation from the Archaic to the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean. The biological remains come from sites excavated from islands off the coast of Venezuela, the Lesser and Greater Antilles, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos. These biological remains include very fragile carbonized seeds and tubers as well as robust shells of conchs. Thus preservation is uneven and the database does not include a complete inventory of the plants and animals used by past colonists of the islands. T o compensate for the ®awed and incomplete data we studied biological samples from as many sites as possible and concentrated on samples from sites where recovery strategies were optimal. We include data presented by other colleagues to increase the number of samples from critical periods and places. Despite the limitations of archaeological preservation, we do see patterns of past exploitation of resources . The replication of patterns gives us the con¤dence that we can see a glimpse of the activities that sustained the lives of the early settlers in the West Indies. These patterns show clear differences between the resources used by people living on different island groups. For example, people living on small coral islands had access to quite different resources than did those people living inland on the larger islands. Similarly, groups of people with Archaic-period technology had a different impact on the environment than did subsequent people who built terraces and intensi¤ed agricultural production. We apply the concept of shifting baselines in charting the changes that are evidenced in the data from the islands ( Jackson 1997; Jackson et al. 1996; Pauly 1995). Preface Without a paleontological, archaeological, or historical perspective it is hard to imagine what environmental conditions were like in the past. The archaeological data reveal changes wrought directly and indirectly by humans and the more widespread environmental ®uctuations. Without this time perspective we may view a forested area as pristine when in fact it had been selectively forested, cleared, farmed, and reforested with second-growth trees that may support a different complex of plant and animal species. Shifting baselines in the West Indian Islands indicate initial forested islands, clearing, incipient agriculture and arboriculture, and ultimately agricultural intensi¤cation. At the same time ¤shing and gathering of land crabs and marine molluscs were the focus of the subsistence economy. Endemic rodents were hunted, managed, and introduced from island to island. When land crabs and reef ¤shes were overexploited there was a shift to more intensive gathering of molluscs and¤shing pelagic species. In some places agricultural systems were intensi¤ed, perhaps in part to compensate for declines in protein sources. Trade networks were wide and some animal parts and domestic animals, dogs and guinea pigs, were dispersed. The most major shift in the baseline came with the European takeover, during which Old World domestic animals and plantation crops were introduced. We hope that this review of the biological remains from the islands will be both interesting and conducive to further study. Our survey of the biological remains from archaeological sites has large gaps with no data from whole islands . We leave the reader with the challenge of many unanswered questions. xvi / Preface ...

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