UF Researcher: Oldest Archaeological Site In Bahamas Yields Rich Food

May 30, 1997

GAINESVILLE — Looking for a healthy diet with Caribbean flair? How about iguanas, green sea turtles and red-footed boobies?

A University of Florida researcher says those were some of the menu items for Indians who lived 1,000 years ago on an out-of-the-way island and had some of the best and healthiest food in the Caribbean.

The oldest archaeological site in the Bahamas archipelago, on the small island of Grand Turk, reveals that people ate a much healthier diet than the early residents of the big islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, said William Keegan, a UF anthropologist who excavated the site. Radiocarbon dates place the settlement at between 700 and 1000 A.D.

“The food remains we’ve found suggest that this ancient banquet must have been a cornucopia for the Indians,” Keegan said. “They were probably extremely well-nourished. Skeletal remains from elsewhere in the Bahamas show the people had marvelous health and diets.”

Keegan’s team has collected samples to identify the plants and animals that lived on the island when humans first arrived there.

This tiny island in the Turks and Caicos islands had much more abundant resources than the bigger islands of the Caribbean that were colonized earlier, largely because it was surrounded by unusually shallow, productive fishing grounds, he said.

More than half of the Indians’ diet came from green sea turtles, which provided the highest rate of return in food value, he said. Iguanas and a variety of birds, including the red-footed booby, also figured heavily in the diet, based on bones recovered from the site.

“There has always been an assumption in archaeology that people moved to small islands only as a last resort because larger ones, with more arable land, had richer environments that produced better standards of living,” he said. “The results on Grand Turk suggest quite the opposite.

“The food remains reflect the richest diet ever observed for a native West Indian population,” Keegan said. “Nowhere else have green sea turtles been found in such abundance, nor have the fishes been of such consistently large size.”

Despite its former richness, Grand Turk today must import all its food from the United States. The original forests were cut down after Europeans arrived in the 17th century. Cats and dogs were allowed to roam free and kill off native animals. Iguanas, red-footed boobies, a species of tortoise and other valuable wildlife became extinct.

“People have the mistaken impression that the ocean has an unlimited supply of food, but we’re seeing relatively early in the West Indies that the resources were being depleted and people were having to work harder for a living,” Keegan said. “Humans can have quite a detrimental effect on both the marine and terrestrial environments.”

What little that is known about the early Caribbean people comes from much later accounts of their contact with Christopher Columbus and other Europeans, Keegan said. Few archaeologists have excavated in the Bahamas, said Keegan, whose team is currently examining pottery and shell tools found at the site.

“Our research is giving us a picture of life in the West Indies in a time period that is not very well-known or understood,” he said. “This is the earliest ceramic-age site north and west of Puerto Rico that has ever been excavated. So it’s uncovering a huge gap in our knowledge of this region.”