{"id":71,"date":"2008-12-03T21:26:04","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T21:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/?p=71"},"modified":"2009-02-18T05:07:33","modified_gmt":"2009-02-18T05:07:33","slug":"small-islands-given-short-shrift-in-assembling-archaeological-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/2008\/12\/small-islands-given-short-shrift-in-assembling-archaeological-record\/","title":{"rendered":"Small Islands Given Short Shrift In Assembling Archaeological Record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019ve written <strong>history<\/strong> based on the bigger islands,\u201d said Bill Keegan, a University of <a title=\"Florida Museums\" href=\"http:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/Ellis-Island-museum.htm\"><strong>Florida archaeologist<\/strong><\/a><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"float: left; border: 1px solid black; margin: 1px;\" title=\"Florida Historical  Museums\" src=\"http:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/images\/island.jpg\" alt=\"World Florida museum in historical\" \/> whose study is published online in the <a title=\"Urban Archaeology\" href=\"http:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/urban_archaeology.htm\"><strong>journal Human Ecology<\/strong><\/a>. \u201cYet not only are we now seeing people earlier on smaller islands, but we\u2019re seeing them move into territories where we didn\u2019t expect them to at the time that they arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Early Ceramic Age settlements have been found in the U.S. <strong>Virgin Islands<\/strong> and Montserrat, for example, but are absent from all of the larger islands in the Lesser Antilles, Keegan said. And all of the small islands along the windward east coast of <strong>St. Lucia<\/strong> have substantial ceramic artifacts \u2014 evidence of settlement \u2014 despite being less than one kilometer, or .62 mile, long, said Keegan, who is curator of <strong>Caribbean archaeology<\/strong> at the <strong>Florida Museum<\/strong> of Natural History on the UF campus.<br \/>\nBut small islands had coastlines rich with fish, and the absence of dense woodlands made them more suited to farming and hunting small prey such as iguanas, tortoises and hutias, a cat-sized rodent, he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the short term, small islands often are superior to larger islands, and for a variety of reasons, they were actually people\u2019s first choice,\u201d Keegan said. \u201cThey had better wind flow, fewer mosquitoes and more plentiful marine resources. With sufficient water and a relatively small amount of land to grow certain kinds of crops, they had everything one would need.\u201d<br \/>\nIn another case, pottery remains were found on an extremely tiny island in the Turks and Caicos that had little soil and was accessible only by a sand spit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019ve written history based on the bigger islands,\u201d said Bill Keegan, a University of Florida archaeologist whose study is published online in the journal Human Ecology. \u201cYet not only are we now seeing people earlier on smaller islands, but we\u2019re seeing them move into territories where we didn\u2019t expect them to at the time that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[98,99],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-medieval-archaeology","tag-florida-archaeologist","tag-virgin-islands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}