Crossing the Borders: New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean

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Caribbean Paleoethnobotany
Present Status and New Horizons (Understanding
the Evolution of an Indigenous Ethnobotany)
Lee A. Newsom
Cibolles des Yndes (Onions of the Indies). “These are the onions, sweet and very
large, more so than those of France, being white inside and red outside. The Indians
eat them as we eat apples— they have some all the time. They grow them
from seed in their gardens and harvest them three times a year.”
—Histoire Naturelle des Indies (The Drake Manuscript,
middle sixteenth century [Pierpont Morgan Library 1996])
Introduction
Humanistic botanical knowledge and practices in the Caribbean culminated an
ancient and richly textured ethnobotanical tradition, a complex- adaptive process
that was the multidimensional product of centuries of human- plant interactions
and that also involved a fusion of earlier botanical traditions transferred from
different source regions. At the time of European contact, Caribbean indigenous
people exploited a variety of plant taxa for diverse purposes. Many of these were
managed in specifically prepared agricultural grounds or in multifunctional home
gardens, venues that separately and together incorporated unique combinations of
native and exotic cultigens, quasi- domesticates, and other taxa esteemed for their
edible fruit or for other products. 1
The consumers and gardeners themselves are of central interest, of course, as
the people who depended to one degree or another on plant resources for their
existence— both managed and wild— and who developed the specialized knowledge
and skill to locate, exploit, and maintain particular plant resources for the
purposes to which they were put. We can reasonably assume that the native ethnobotany
was an integral part of Caribbean Indian cultural and ecological dynamics,
and I would argue that we can be fully cognizant of neither one without a thorough
understanding of the roles and significance of plant resources in the daily
lives, ritual activities, and broader social sphere (e.g., issues of sustainable resources,
economy, trade, and related interactions among groups) of the various indigenous
peoples of the region.
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