Postscript

Partial adoptions of food production are always rather puzzling, unless the adopters lived in environments that were poor for farming but rich for foraging. Certainly, such environments have always existed, and as far as low-level food production is concerned this might be a key factor. The general tendency within the more fertile agricultural latitudes of the world has thus been for such low-level food producers either to develop themselves into more dedicated food producers with time, or to fuse with some of the latter due to varying processes of immigration and admixture. It appears that the latter might have been the case with the Archaic to Saladoid shift in the Caribbean. The opposition between the indigenous and the exogenous in explanatory terms bulks very large in discussions about the so-called "Saladoid," which brought in new types of artifacts to many Caribbean Islands, as well as a much greater reliance on agriculture, roughly between 800 and 500 bc.