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

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Ciboney, are substantially confirmed by the fact that the Taíno group from
Cuba differs from its coeval Ciboney samples from the most western side of
the same island, which suggests that they belong to different migratory flows.
3. Cueva Roja, a more archaic Dominican but non- Taíno sample, shows strong
affinities with the more recent Cuban Ciboney. This strong association indeed
indicates that the Ciboney, confined to the far western side of Cuba, might
have been the last representatives of a culture that was more widely spread in
the Greater Antilles at the times before the expansion of the Taíno culture during
the Late Ceramic period. The more the Taíno migrated through the Greater
Antilles, the more the Ciboney were slowly confined to the western part of the
most western island in the Caribbean Sea, in a cul- de- sac fashion.
4. The U.S. Virgin Islands ( Saladoid- Chican), Guadeloupe (Troumassoid), and to
some extent also Puerto Rico (Saladoid) samples show a good level of affinity
with the Taíno, which suggests that all these samples belong to the same migratory
wave. The present data on dental morphological traits do not seem to separate
the sample from the northern part of the Lesser Antilles.
5. Florida and Venezuela do not show a regular association with any group. The
unexpected result of the collections from Venezuela, in contrast with the archaeological
data, might be due to admixture and/ or drift processes, which
could have changed the biological structure after the first settlement of the
Caribbean islands. This might have masked the original affinity between the
continental and the islands populations. The Florida samples do not show any
clear affinity with the island groups. This is consistent with the notion that the
populations from the northern continental areas might not have played a role
in the peopling of the Caribbean Islands, as the archaeological models state,
and is in contrast with the hypothesis by Lovén (1935) of an involvement of
populations from Florida in the earliest migrations. Therefore, in this case the
biological data are consistent with the cultural information sustaining the absence
of genetic exchanges between the populations from Florida and those
from the Caribbean islands.
6. On the base of the present data set, very little can be inferred on the so- called
Island Carib and on their relationships with the other Caribbean populations.
7. The present results and interpretation do not solve (and do not intend to) the
issue of labeling “Ciboney” the aceramic groups; nonetheless, they open a
window on the chronological and geographic biological diversity in the Caribbean
until the European conquest.
In conclusion, the morphological dental traits were able to detect two major migrations
in the Caribbean area before the conquest. A more ancient one introduced
groups of hunter- gatherers and a more recent one the agriculturalists.
The present anthropological data do not seem to support the hypothesis that
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