2025/11/27 by Rick Schulting, Mary Jane Berman, Grace Turner +1 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory
paper · doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2025.109686
openalex publication_date 2025/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/11/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
There remains considerable debate over the scale and nature of impacts by pre-industrial, small-scale societies on the natural environment. In the pre-Columbian Caribbean, this has included clear evidence for terrestrial extirpations and extinctions, as well as more equivocal evidence for the over-exploitation of near-shore marine resources. Bringing a new line of evidence to this debate, we present the results of a radiocarbon and stable isotope project undertaken on pre-Columbian (Lucayan) human remains from Guanahaní (San Salvador), The Bahamas. The dates obtained range between ca. AD 900 and 1400, encompassing much of the known settlement history of the island, as demonstrated through a comparison with Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates from settlements. Associated mean human stable carbon isotope ( δ 13 C) values changed significantly over this period, from ca. −11.8‰ to ca. −14.6‰, consistent with previous suggestions of a decline in the use of marine resources across the archipelago as a whole. We interpret this as a result of local resource depletion through over-exploitation, impacting human decision-making in favour of greater emphasis on managed terrestrial resources. The available zooarchaeological evidence offers some support for a shift in marine resource use that is consistent with this scenario. Our results provide an independent line of evidence supporting the potential for small human populations to significantly affect their environments.