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

Caribbean Paleoethnobotany / 187
change represent the cultural values and preferences of different human groups,
changes in human activities involving wood use, or does it signal the local extirpation
of particular taxa necessitating a switch to other species? Can pulses of carbon
particulate matter in sediment cores (e.g., Burney and Burney 1994) be used
to clarify such changes, assuming we can discern forest clearing from the residues
of natural fire events? In combination these lines of evidence may help to establish
the scale of past human influence in the Caribbean landscape. Perhaps we can distinguish,
if we are very creative, between the carbon and other residues of singleevent
or short- term clearing for horticulture, even some crop residues, vs. the effects
of repeatedly impacted areas, including continuous fuelwood extraction. And
since such human influence on local forests, and one way or the other fragmentation
of natural habitats, represents a complex and multiscalar process, necessarily
extending to faunal communities, soils, and adjacent watersheds (successional
changes induced by and under the influence of human extraction pressure), understanding
the entire human- ecosystem dynamic is essential to our interpretation
of the history of human- landscape interactions (and certainly paleo ethnobotany
and paleobotany are important parts of this equation).
II. Making the Most of Excavations. What can be done to gain greater insights into
the prehistoric ethnobotany of the Caribbean? How can we overcome some potential
pitfalls, particularly the loss of archaeobotanical data, (i.e., we get what we
look for . . . or we certainly will not find what we do not look for . . . or we can [and
have] caused data to be lost)? We need to rethink, or at least consider in greater
depth, sampling and recovery issues, in other words, about planning and implementing
sufficient data collection in Caribbean archaeology. This has been said
before, but is worth reiteration.
We all recognize the inherent complexity of archaeological sites, including details
of their internal organization and how this may reflect and prove to be the key
to understanding the underlying social dynamics of ancient settlements. Household
archaeology has become a topic of interest in our region, and necessarily involves
as one aspect of ancient households and communities, trying to discern
specific details of foodways and the internal circulation and distribution of food
items and other commodities (Sheets 2006). This includes among other things
trying to discover the patterns and venues of production, distribution, and consumption;
food storage, management, and control of surpluses; and so forth. Accordingly,
this scale of analysis necessitates a very detailed and comprehensive
sampling effort, for one thing, to recover evidence related to all the links and separate
aspects of subsistence and economy, if not simply to adequately assess species
richness and diversity (Lepofsky and Lertzman 2005), thus diet breadth, and
so on.
In other areas, intensive sampling (coupled fine- scale recovery methods) across
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