Nearly 6,000 years ago, people began to move into the islands of the Caribbean archipelago from the surrounding mainlands. In subsequent millennia they followed a historical trajectory that in some ways paralleled events taking place elsewhere in the Americas. Ultimately, however, the human experience in the Caribbean was unique. The islands of the Caribbean were to a considerable extent a world set apart from the rest of the Americas – connected to wider historical currents but distinct and able to follow a different historical trajectory.

This volume has explored the archaeological evidence for the remarkable story of Caribbean prehistory. The story spans several millennia, hundreds of human generations, and includes periods of dramatic change as well as long periods of continuity. It has taken a century of work by a diverse and remarkable group of archaeologists to piece this story together to the extent that we know it. Yet even now it sometimes seems as if Caribbean archaeologists are working in terra incognita. Many islands lack basic inventories of archaeological sites, and on others only the largest and most obvious sites are well recorded. The past four centuries of intensive agriculture have brought about extensive landscape modifications that have erased much of this archaeological record, and the accelerating pace of coastal development for tourism is destroying more of the archaeological record year by year.