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

186 / Newsom
This type of multidisciplinary research will undoubtedly continue to be pursued
in the islands. But given that wood charcoal is the most abundant and ubiquitous
class of terrestrial archaeobotanical remains preserved and routinely recovered
from Caribbean sites, a complementary avenue of research involves tracking
species frequencies and presence (forest succession and species turnover) and the
use of tree ring evidence.
Temporal and spatial changes in species assemblages reflected in wood charcoal
can shed light on ecosystem (forest) dynamics and health, as well as human
impact on forest environments (Redman 1999), over and above simple notions of
wood preferences and taxon availability. Tree- ring data are a proven proxy of rainfall
patterns and other environmental cycles and perturbations, including in the
seasonally dry tropics as encompasses much of the Caribbean. Methodological refinements
(Baillie 1995; Schweingruber 1988) enable work with samples comprised
of multiple short- ring series, such as is the situation with charcoal assemblages.
Thus, the carbonized remnants of fuelwood we typically recover can potentially
serve not only as longitudinal records tracking natural succession, human extraction
of forest resources, including perhaps human- induced changes in forest composition
and structure, but also as a record of the local and regional paleoecology
and climate variation (Schweingruber 1988, 1996).
Some ultimate goals for Caribbean research combining multiple proxy environmental
data sets— including dendroecology, micro- and macrobotanical remains—
might include to examine more broadly across the region the Caribbean hydrological
cycle and drought record, as Beets and colleagues (2006) have done for
Guadeloupe. A number of areas in the Caribbean are quite arid; with or without
fertile soils we can reasonably infer that extended droughts would have significantly
impacted the success and productivity of plant production, if not at times
rendering horticulture a complete failure. 3
We should attempt to gain a better appreciation too of the past presence and
impacts of other Caribbean- specific environmental perturbations, for example,
volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and storm surges (e.g., Ricklefs and
Bermingham 2001; Schoener et al. 2001; Ten Brink et al. 2006; Tomblin 1981), that
potentially impacted food webs, the food supply and overall well being of prehistoric
human communities. Clarifying this underlying complexity of the humanenvironment
relationship would also facilitate studies of risk avoidance, including
responses to natural environmental variation and the constraints on cultural investments
in an agricultural way of life. All of this bears also on the sustainability
of biotic resources in the region (see, for example, McKee 2003), and in general
the carrying capacity of anthropogenic environments (Abel 1998). Already we can
point to some tree taxa, for example, lignum vitae (Guaiacum sp., Zygophyllaceae),
which seem to have been preferred or commonly targeted for fuelwood early in the
rec ord that we see less of or that disappear entirely from later records. Does this
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