ABSTRACT
The choices made by people living on St Thomas were determined to some extent by the location in which they chose to settle and by the resilience of the natural resources. A whole array of animal resources was used at each site, indicating that no one resource provided sufficient food for the population. Resources are normally exploited closest to the home site within what is called the catchment area (Higgs & Vita-Finzi, 1972), and people living along the shores of bays gathered more invertebrates, particularly mollusks, compared with the people living as far inland as the Tutu site. The predominance of terrestrial resources, both land crabs and vertebrates, in the early deposits at Tutu conforms to this expectation. Likewise, the intensive use of donax by the people living beside the long sandy shores of Magens Bay shows a reliance on a local resource. Donax are a seasonal resource in most places and are scooped with sieves in great numbers from the sand in the receding tide.
