Prehistoric northern Haiti: Settlement in diachronic ecological context

The problem addressed in this dissertation is that available archeological information on Haiti's indigenous cultures is largely based on research more than fifty years old. New settlement survey data reveals that the country's prehistoric culture history is more complex than has been generally known. My research involves an ecological interpretive examination of settlement patterns in which the entirety of Haiti's prehistory is divided into six cultural units. I analyze habitation types and site distribution in terms of terrestrial and underwater environmental settings.; The work focuses on Haiti's north coast and a smaller subarea along the west-central coast. The data include the results of surface survey fieldwork and site information from Haiti's national archeological database. I assess each cultural unit's settlement system and compare these with one another concentrating on site type distributions across topographic subareas and terrain relief zones. This includes computer processing to create three-dimensional graphic models that illustrate the relationships between these variables.; The results demonstrate that Haiti's indigenous settlement patterns contain substantial previously unrecognized information. For example, habitation types and distributions associated with the two nonagricultural era cultural units appear incongruous even though this era has been assumed serially continuous in chronology and culture. Among other possibilities this may indicate a hiatus and that Haiti's chronologically uncertain initial occupation, described in the literature as Paleoindian-like, may be earlier than has been thought. Another finding is that site types and distributions associated with the dawn of the prehistoric agricultural era suggest unfriendly relations between immigrant agricultural groups and resident nonagriculturalists.; Another finding that relates to later times indicates possible conflictive competition among groups in northern Haiti when Columbus arrived in 1492. My analysis suggests that warfare between these groups led to destruction of Columbus's Fort La Navidad and contributed to the tragic decline of Hispaniola's indigenous population that soon followed.; This research demonstrates that terrestrial and underwater investigations in Haiti can provide new information that advances knowledge of West Indies and New World prehistory. My data compilation and analytical methods may be usefully applied elsewhere to studies concerning a variety of archeological and anthropological issues.