Nevis: Summary and Conclusions

by Samuel Wilson, Laura Kozuch, Lee Newsome, J. Daniel Rogers, and Elizabeth Wing

(unpublished script; please do not cite without permission)

I worked on Nevis from 1984 to 1995, along with many friends and colleagues. We were trying to find all of the prehistoric sites that still existed on Nevis, and collect sufficient samples to establish the chronology of prehistoric settlement on the island and characterize the artifacts, including the preserved floral remains, faunal remains, and pottery. This work has now been completed and the results collected in a monograph that is in press. Although I’ve talked about Nevis at this conference before, these are the most complete results to date.
This is a slight rotation of the standard mapping view of the Caribbean that shows us where Nevis is, but also, I think, emphasizes the importance of northern South America on the Caribbean islands from Hispaniola east.

Nevis, as most of you know, is a small island in the Leeward islands of the Lesser Antilles. In some ways our research has tended to reveal that Nevis is in a transitional position, at the northern end of the chain of the Windward islands, and at the eastern end of the Virgins and other islands lying east of Puerto Rico. It’s artifacts show influences from Puerto Rico (but less than is seen in the Virgin Islands or St. Martin), and also influences from Guadeloupe and south (but less so than on Antigua). In many ways, however, Nevis shares the basic characteristics of most of the islands in the Leeward group. I was working with Dan Rogers on the ceramics from the Saladoid site of Nevis, for example, at the same time that Birget Faber Morse and Ben Rouse were working on the material from the contemporary site of Indian Creek, Antigua. I went and looked at their ceramics and they were more than 95% identical to the ones from Nevis. It’s not unexpected -- given the high degree of mobility of the prehistoric occupants, there was probably a lot of interaction between these islands in prehistoric times.
This shows the Nevis sites in chronological relation to other sites in the Leewards, with the sequence of islands on the left. There are still some problems on this chart which the people working on Montserrat, Statia, and Saba will no doubt spot, (there are also some things I’d fix on Nevis) but basically it shows that Nevis has representatives of all the cultural groups found on other islands -- never the first, biggest, or longest-lasting, but they are all represented.

The overall picture of the prehistoric settlement history of Nevis includes: An aceramic period of small-scale, intermittent use of the island from about 1500 to 500 B.C. There are only two sites on Nevis dating to this period. The Saladoid period on Nevis lasted from around 100 B.C. until A.D. 600 or so.

There is only one site that is Saladoid, and it appears to have been occupied continuously for all of this time. There is also a transitional period lasting from A.D. 600 to 900 that shows a clear continuity between Saladoid and post-Saladoid time. Dan Rogers, who has analyzed the ceramics from Nevis, has described this transitional phase as Hichmans II. Then, between 900 and 1200 there is widespread occupation of the island, with archaeological sites at every significant stream mouth all around the island.


In doing the survey we did not find sites dating later than A.D. 1200 or so. We surveyed the cost inland 1 km, and 2km up the streams that could have been water sources in prehistoric times. Given Corinne and Menno’s discoveries at Kelby’s ridge and elsewhere on Saba, I now think it’s likely that we might be able to find late sites high up on the ridges or in places that are far less obvious than theseknown sites. This near-abandonment says, to me, that for political reasons, the Leeward islands had become a dangerous place in the last few centuries before Europeans arrived. Of course after the Europeans arrived the Lesser Antilles became even more dangerous…
The first thing I’d like to deal with is Lee Newsom’s work dealing with
paleobotanical remains. She has revealed several interesting things. One Is part of my continuing education as a Caribbean archaeologist. I had thought that the vegetation types that are now at the top of the mountains -- what Professor Beard called “Elfin woodland, Montane thicket, and Palm brake” -- originally continued far down the mountain, even right down to the coast.

From Lee’s work it is now apparent that tropical dry forests were more
dominant in the dryer areas closer to the coast. These forests don’t really have modern analogues in the Caribbean because most of the areas they occupied were used for sugar cultivation.

Also, one of the dominant species of this vegetation type on Nevis and elsewhere in the Caribbean was Lignum vitae (Guayacán). It was a slow-growing and very hard wood (it is called “Ironwood” on Nevis) and also was reputed to have medicinal qualities. Lee reports that it was actively harvested by Europeans as early as 1508.

Among the other very interesting things revealed in Newsom’s paleoethnobotanical analyses was the provisional identification of manioc tuber fragments dating to the Saladoid period. I think most people assume that manioc was a Saladoid staple, but apart from some tissue fragments at Hope Estate, the tubers have not been preserved.

 

This is a summary graphic showing the use of different habitats by the people from 4 sites. It really shows a pretty similar pattern of use for three groups -- the aceramic folks, transitional (Hichman II) and later Post-Saladoid occupations -- and somewhat less typical behavior by the Saladoid people.

The main difference there is the greater Saladoid reliance on terrestrial resources than the others. It’s interesting to get this additional point of view on the idea that there’s an in situ transition from Saladoid to post-Saladoid on Nevis.

This shows which of the faunal assemblages were most alike -- not so much in terms of habitats this time but rather in terms of SPECIES. The darker red boxes show which assemblages are most alike. The orange ones are less similar, and the grey ones are least similar.


One interesting thing here is that the aceramic site is pretty similar to the post-Saladoid site GE-1. GE-1 is also similar to the Saladoid site. JO-2 --the post-Saladoid site on the SW corner of the island -- is the farthest from anything else.

 

The explanation for this probably relates to proximity. GE-1, 5, and 6 are close together on the southeast windward coast. JO-2 is on the southwestern lee coast.

Together with the information on habitats, however, it shows that people would use different species, but basically exploit similar habitats with similar techniques.

  
 
  Trophic levels, simply put, reflect how “high on the food chain” people are getting their food. Wing and Kozuch use this as a way of looking at how much stress people are putting on the communities of animals they are eating. They are using a method that has been worked out since the 1950s, and which shows, incidentally, that the modern human population is eating animals of lower and lower trophic levels, and has been since the 50s.

What this shows is that for all vertebrates, especially reef fish, there isn’t much change through time on Nevis. Even when there are 21 sites occupied at close to the same time from 900 to 1200, they aren’t starving or making radical changes in their preferred diet. The relatively low “total aquatic tropic level” for the aceramic period reflects their use of shellfish. It’s interesting that the shellfish these people used, which were very lightly exploited by humans, were HUGE compared to modern specimens. I showed some Arca zebra and Cittarium pica shells from that site to local shellfish gatherers and they said they had never seem individuals so large. So it was easy food to get and they got it.		  
 
 

The basic message of both the paleobotanical research and the faunal research is that despite this large upswing in population between 900 and 1200, the prehistoric inhabitants hadn’t really stressed the environment’s capacity to produce food or fuel wood. The people who lived on Nevis had a wide range of foods to exploit including shellfish, land crabs, terrestrial mammals, semi-domesticated agouti, shallow and deep reef fish, sea grass beds, turtles,and pelagic fish, and they could also intensify their use of wild or domesticated plants. The story of their economic adaptation to this environment is one of balancing preference against availability and effort.

  

 

There is still a lot to do on Nevis and elsewhere in the Caribbean, of course. From the collaborative work with Lee and Liz and Laura and Dan, I have learned so many new things, and learned to see things in new and more useful ways. It’s also a little frightening to see how many assumptions, theories and beliefs I had early on in the research that turned out to be completely and utterly wrong.

But that’s true for all of us in Caribbean archaeology and hopefully we’re making some progress…

 

S. Wilson
s.wilson@mail.utexas.edu
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