Canoe societies in the Caribbean: Ethnography, archaeology, and ecology of precolonial canoe manufacturing and voyaging

Abstract

In the Caribbean, there is little direct evidence of canoes in the archaeological record, while inter-island connectivity is ubiquitous in archaeological explanations. This contradiction suggests that aspects of society related to canoe manufacturing and voyaging have tended to be under-represented in our interpretations. This paper aims to contribute to correcting this under-representation and highlight the canoe as the foundation of precolonial infrastructure by examining the ecology of canoe-specific resources using habitat suitability modeling along with diverse lines of evidence from archaeological findings, ethnohistoric accounts, and experimental ethnoarchaeology. The synthesis of these diverse lines of evidence leads to a discussion of some implications that may follow from adopting a more canoe-centric perspective on the archaeological record.