Resilience in Pre-Columbian Caribbean House-Building: Dialogue Between Archaeology and Humanitarian Shelter

Abstract

This paper responds to questions posed by archaeologists and engineers in the humanitarian sector about relationships between shelter, disasters and resilience. Enabled by an increase in horizontal excavations combined with high-resolution settlement data from excavations in the Dominican Republic, the paper presents a synthesis of Caribbean house data spanning a millennium (1400 BP- 450 BP). An analysis of architectural traits identify the house as an institution that constitutes and catalyses change in an emergent and resilient pathway. The “Caribbean architectural mode” emerged in a period of demographic expansion and cultural transition, was geographically widespread, different from earlier and mainland traditions and endured the hazards of island and coastal ecologies. We use archaeological analysis at the house level to consider the historical, ecological and regional dimensions of resilience in humanitarian action

Jamaican Taíno Settlement Configuration at the Time of Christopher Columbus

“…Eight postholes ranging in size from 9 to 17 cm in diameter were recorded but without definitive pattern. Notably, two sets of adjacent postholes had been cut into the bedrock (Figure 8), in a fashion similar to the “holster-formed postholes” documented by Samson (2010:142) at the El Cabo site in the Dominican Republic, but also present at several other sites in the Greater and Lesser Antilles (Samson et al 2015:331). The nature of the platform and the materials recovered suggest a house floor occupation.…”

“…A wide-ranging review of Caribbean household archaeology incorporating settlement layouts, house form data, and residential sizes can be found in Samson (2010). Tabulation of these data in a later paper (Samson et al 2015:327) identifies 15 sites where excavations have exposed a total of 98 residential features. Most of these are post-built with round to oval floor plans varying in size from 10 m 2 to 576 m 2 .…”

“…Most of these are post-built with round to oval floor plans varying in size from 10 m 2 to 576 m 2 . Yet, excluding Bellevue-Manning's Hill, there are only six excavated houses with interior areas under 20 m 2 (Samson et al 2015:330), and these tend to be isolated occurrences on sites with much larger structures (e.g., Righter 2002:312). An intriguing exception to this occurs in south-central Cuba in the late prehistoric to contact period (Horizon III) hilltop site of Loma del Convento (Knight 2010:36–37).…”

Archaeology, environmental justice, and climate change on islands of the Caribbean and southwestern Indian Ocean

“…The same dialectic between local and global exists today. For example, archaeological evidence of a pre-Columbian mode of domestic architecture across the Caribbean island region suggests that semipermanent houses were well adapted to climate hazards (72). The labor-intensive components of houses were designed to withstand hurricane winds and other hazards, while other components were easy to rebuild.…”

“…The Caribbean and SWIO, however, have been less well represented in historical ecological studies than other island groups (5,73,74) and require further research on the adaptive role of indigenous forms and practices alongside efforts to disseminate research findings to a broad audience, including policy makers. When indigenous forms and practices are celebrated in these regions today, it is typically in a fetichized context of ecotourism, where foreign visitors are offered opportunities to experience "traditional" lifeways, rather than in a context of developing and revitalizing successful solutions to climate hazards (72).…”