Columbus’ footprints on Hispaniola from a coastal perspective: multi-proxy reconstruction of environmental change in the northern Dominican Republic.

Abstract

Columbus founded the very first permanent settlement in the New World, La Isabela, on the northwestern coast of the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola during his second voyage in AD 1493. Assessment of the character and scale of human disturbance of the natural environment in one of the earliest colonized regions in the New World is hampered by a lack of independent paleoenvironmental evidence. We present a reconstruction of environmental change from pre-Columbian to post-Colonial times based on sediment cores from a near-coastal lake (Laguna Grande) and a mangrove swamp (Estero Hondo), reflecting land use changes over the past 3200 years. The environmental history was reconstructed from changing grain size distributions, organic carbon content, fossil pollen, coprophilous fungal spores and charcoal particle concentrations. During the early Ceramic (ca. 250 cal yr AD), the Saladoid people had only minor impact on the environment and cultivated squashes near the mangroves that provided them with shells and fish. Most likely, cultivation of maize commenced on the shores of Laguna Grande during the late Ceramic (ca. 1150 cal yr AD). Absence of evidence for cattle introduction, Old World crop cultivation or deforestation, suggests early colonial disturbance was mostly restricted to the Cibao valley, where the gold rush lead the colonists to the inlands. Fire frequency increased from ca. 1700 cal yr AD onwards, potentially as a result of large numbers of European immigrants and enslaved Africans that enlarged demographic pressure on the environment. Anthropogenic disturbance had not significantly affected the mangroves until ca. 1770 cal yr AD, when frequent fires and deforestation degraded the forest. Our results demonstrate that colonization more extensively and more instantly impacted the natural environment in the Cibao valley compared to only minor disturbances on the Atlantic coastal plain. Intensification of anthropogenic disturbance on the Atlantic coast is particularly evident after three centuries of colonization. This study underlines the importance of reliable age constraints for interpretations regarding cause and effect in terms of natural and human disturbances. Considering a higher level of detail desirable, the suite of proxies could be supplemented by phytholith analysis so as to identify crop plants that are included in the records of higher taxonomic ranks such as potato and tomato (both Solanaceae).