Though She Be But Little: Resource Resilience, Amerindian Foraging, and Long-Term Adaptive Strategies in the Grenadines, West Indies

Abstract

ABSTRACTBecause small islands are frequently associated with spatially heterogeneous, biodiverse marine environments that readily exceed the productive capacity of their associated terrestrial habitat, it has been argued that these were attractive settlement locations for people due to the rich aquatic resource base they provided. I examine this proposition for the small West Indian island of Carriacou (32 km2), situated in the Grenadines micro-archipelago, in light of recent zooarchaeological findings for two of its major archaeological sites, Sabazan and Grand Bay, where a millennium of sustainable marine foraging is evidenced. While reliance on abundant marine resources clearly contributed to the long-term occupation of Sabazan and Grand Bay, fine-grained analysis of the fish and invertebrate remains suggests that abundance alone does not explain settlement persistence. I argue that the key to understanding the lengthy prehistoric occupation of Grand Bay and Sabazan lies in the structure of its marine environments, especially the functional and response diversity of targeted prey, and the flexibility of Amerindian foraging strategies. Settlement viability on Carriacou did not rest solely on the importance of marine resource extraction, but more specifically on the resilience of the marine environments exploited and the behavior of foragers in relation to this.