ABSTRACT
The human colonization of islands on a global scale often necessitated food production to ensure long-term survivability. Both plants and animals usually accompanied population dispersals, though the former played a much more important role. The Caribbean is no exception, whereby Amerindian groups imported numerous plant species over many thousands of years with the intensity of cultivation accelerating during the Ceramic Age (post-2500 bp). New research is shedding light on the types of cultivars that were exploited by humans, how these may have been used in conjunction with other marine and terrestrial resources, and the resulting impacts on island landscapes and nutritional health. An historical ecology approach is used here to examine the major long-term trends currently observed in pre-Columbian archaeological, archaeobotanical, and palaeoenvironmental records to demonstrate the utility of using multiple datasets to observe how humans were both influenced by and transformed their ecologically fragile environments.
