Fluorescein dyes as bacterial stains

Abstract

The Lesser Antillean island arc holds a favorable position on the route from the South American mainland to the Greater Antilles, stimulating colonization processes, linking two major centers of cultural development and encouraging the establishment of interconnecting interaction networks.Both the South American mainland and the Greater Antilles have been of great importance for the socio-cultural development of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles during the entire pre-Columbian era.The discontinuous distribution of natural resources and a great variability in the availability of raw materials is regarded as one of the driving forces behind the highly mobile nature and diversified procurement strategies of the Archaic Age fisher-collector communities and the establishment and maintenance of intensive contact networks of the Ceramic Age horticulturalists. Mobility patterns and material distributions evidence that these networks changed through time probably as a result of the shifting and expansion of group territories, fission and fusion of local groups and changing socio-political organization.During the Archaic Age the region was sparsely inhabited by people adopting an annual mobility cycle encompassing multiple islands, each representing a unique resource patch within the environmentally heterogeneous region.During the Ceramic Age more permanent settlements were located on the coast as well as in the interior of islands in diverse ecological settings, people taking on a broad-spectrum subsistence economy and living in villages.The inhabitants of the Windward Islands or southern Lesser Antilles maintained intensive contacts with the South American mainland evidenced by highly symbolic representations on ceramic and lithic artifacts recalling their origin and the enduring exchange of exotic objects. Ties with the mainland are secured until colonial times with the intrusion of the so-called ‘Island Caribs’ who hold the assertion to have conquered the islands out of the Guianas.The Leeward and Virgin Islands, i.e., the northern Lesser Antilles, on the other hand, show an increase in the number and size of ideology-linked Taino artifacts over time demonstrating that their inhabitants interacted predominantly with people on the islands of the Greater Antilles emphasizing their incorporation into the realm of the Taino cacicazgos during the last centuries prior to colonization. Despite partaking in these regional interaction spheres, both the northern and southern Lesser Antilles are characterized by local cultural developments and obviously participated in more localized networks as well, that expanded and contracted through time.After European colonization the native population of the Lesser Antilles was decimated by diseases and slavery. Nonetheless, missionary accounts from the mid-seventeenth century still attest to a sizeable indigenous population and Amerindians survive to this day on Dominica and several other southern Lesser Antillean islands.