free download - University Press of Colorado

Four
Fail to Prepare, Then Prepare to Fail: Rethinking Threat,
Vulnerability, and Mitigation in the Precolumbian Caribbean
Jago Cooper
Introduction and Key Challenges
The islands of the Caribbean are a particularly interesting geographical region
to examine the dynamic relationship between past human communities and
sudden environmental change. This chapter examines how past peoples, living
on the islands in the Caribbean Sea, were vulnerable to a number of environmental
threats. The focus of this chapter is the impact of floods, droughts, and
wind shear created by relative sea level rise, precipitation change, and hurricane
activity. These hazards were identified as particularly relevant to current
debates, given the predicted increase in the risk of such hazards in the near future
(Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre 2009; Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change 2007). The potential Precolumbian mitigation of
these hazards through the development of household architecture, settlement
location, food procurement strategies, and networks of community interaction
is explored in this chapter; and the relative success in mitigating impact
and avoiding disaster is considered. This chapter reviews different scales of
analysis, from the global, regional, national, and local, to extract key themes
for comparative discussion. These research themes are then examined in more
detail using a case study area in north-central Cuba where the author has conducted
interdisciplinary collaborative research with Cuban and international
colleagues since 2002.
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