The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

8
ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE CARIBBEAN
REGION
LOUIS ALLAIRE
Nature has often raised the most formidable barriers ever experienced by
humans in their developments; oceans, deserts, forests, and mountains
have served to divide and isolate peoples from the very beginnings of
human existence. Landscapes have also presented situations that on the
contrary have favored and even encouraged human interaction over vast
areas. Maritime basins surrounded by continuous stretches of coastline
are likely to have had this stimulating effect not only around their coastal
periphery but also directly between various points across their shores,
when adequate seafaring technology had become available. This is not a
matter of environmental determinism but more properly of opportunistic
circumstances.
The Mediterranean is a classic example. Peoples and civilizations
emerging around its shores were bound from the earliest prehistoric
times, not only by the uniformity in climate and landscape but culturally
by a common Palaeolithic substratum, and later by a shared subsistence
basis of wheat, olives, sheep, and marine fishes. Although political integration
was only once and briefly accomplished by the Romans, the area
never escaped a cultural interdependency that at times bounded France
to the Holy Land, or Spain to Morocco.
GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL CONDITIONS
In the New World the only geographical setting that could have led to a
similar situation is the Caribbean Sea. This unique maritime basin is
essentially a division of the Atlantic Ocean that overlaps both North and
South America; indeed, a true maritime basin even extends as far north
as the Gulf of Mexico (see Map 8.1). The more precise boundaries of the
Caribbean Sea originate in the north at the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico
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