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Who came first, pigs or pioneers? In Barbados, this has been a historical mystery since the first English settlers arrived on the island in 1627 to meet what they thought was a herd of wild pigs from Europe.
A recent discovery by an SFU archaeologist sheds new light on the issue. Christina Giovas discovered the jawbone of a peccary, a South American mammal that looks like a wild pig, while looking for a larger project on prehistoric animal introductions in the Caribbean .
"I had not given him much notice at the time, but I had simply collected it with other bones," said Giovas, the principal author of a recently published study in PLOS ONE. "It was completely unexpected and honestly I thought I had made a mistake with the identification of the species."
Giovas and colleagues, George Kamenov and John Krigbaum of the University of Florida, radiographed the bone with a radiocarbon and performed an isotopic analysis of strontium to determine age and determine if the pecari was born in Barbados or had been imported elsewhere.
The results showed that the peccary was local and dated from 1645-1670, when the English wrote their account of finding wild pigs from Europe on the Caribbean island. The researchers were not only able to demonstrate that it had been introduced into a historic peccary, but that the first famous maps of the region represented peccaries that had been confused with pigs by the English.
Giovas says the results upset the accepted colonial history of Barbados and reflect the speed with which Europeans began to alter the environments of the New World by changing the distribution of species.
"By checking the historical and archaeological records, we determined that the most likely source of introduction of peccaries came from Spanish or Portuguese ships passing off the island in the 16th century – and most likely remained as a source meat for future visitors, "she says.
Archaeologists discover new evidence that animals were introduced to the prehistoric Caribbean
Christina M. Giovas et al, 87Sr / 86Sr and 14C challenges to the introduction of pecari (Tayassuidae) accepted a historical interpretation of the 1657 Ligon map of Barbados, PLOS ONE (2019). DOI: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0216458
Quote:
Archaeological discovery enriches a piece of the history of Barbados (May 16, 2019)
recovered on May 16, 2019
at https://phys.org/news/2019-05-archaeological-discovery-upends-piece-barbados.html
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