Indigenous Landscape Transformation on Northern Haytí: An Archaeological and Environmental Database of the Montecristi Coast

Abstract

This paper addresses a database collected and constructed as part of PhD research project on the north-western coast of the Dominican Republic. The PhD was part of the ERC Synergy Grant NEXUS 1492: New World Encounters in a Globalizing World. The database was collected during fieldwork campaigns between 2014 and 2015. Fieldwork consisted of a regional survey, material culture registry and collection, test pit excavation, and processing relevant environmental variables. The archaeological data consists of a record of 102 archaeological sites, the material culture associated with them (lithic, shell and coral objects, shell mollusk species), and the relationship between site location and a set of relevant environmental variables used for statistical analysis. This database is one of the only open access archaeological databases available at the moment in the Caribbean and can be reused by any Caribbean archaeologist working in the Greater Antilles. Funding statement: This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 319209, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Corinne Hofman.