The zooarchaeological laboratory in the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida has led the way. Beginning in the 1960s, its staff, students, and associates have found that the original Saladoid migrants placed a relatively high emphasis on terrestrial rather than maritime resources, presumably because they had originated in the interior of South America, and that seafood became more important to them during Ostionoid time, in part because of the development of deep-sea fishing.

Rainey’s discovery of a change in diet from land crabs among the Saladoid peoples to marine shellfish among the Ostionoids is a case in point. The shift has been variously attributed to the overhunting of crabs, to a change in climate that may have decimated them, and to an outbreak of disease among them (Goodwin 1979, 370–375, 381–382; Jones 1985; Keegan 1989). Alternatively, the Ostionoid peoples may simply have lost the Saladoid peoples’ taste for crabs.

In the 1970s, the Museo del Hombre Dominicano established a laboratory for the study of food remains. Among its achievements has been recovery of the pollen of a number of wild vegetables eaten by the Casimiroid and Ostionoid peoples (Veloz Maggiolo, Ortega, and Caba Fuentes 1973, 169–170). Members of the museum staff have also reached conclusions about changes in the natural environment, such as the extinction of ground sloths, which they attribute to overhunting by the Casimiroids (Veloz Maggiolo and Ortega 1976, 160–162).

Mainland archaeologists have paid more attention to agriculture than to food gathering. They have obtained not only culture-historical but also isotopic evidence, the latter by analyzing human bones, that the initial Saladoid farmers cultivated primarily manioc (cassava) and carried it with them into the Antilles where it was still the staple crop when Columbus arrived. By that time, however, maize had replaced it as the staple in the Orinoco Valley, presumably because maize compensated for a deficiency of protein in the local diet (van der Merwe, Roosevelt, and Vogel 1981; Roosevelt 1980). The fact that maize did not also become the primary crop in the Greater Antilles is further evidence against the conflicting hypotheses of migration of one or more Ostionoid subseries from the mainland.

Caribbeanists have also paid considerable attention to patterns of settlement. By plotting the distribution of dwelling sites in Puerto Rico period by period, Rouse (1952) was able to follow the expansion of the ceramic-age inhabitants of that island from their initial settlements on the coastal plains through the foothills and mountain valleys into the uplands. It was this gradual adaptation to life on a large island that eventually made it possible for the Ostionoids to replace the Casimiroids on the still-larger islands of Hispaniola and Cuba.

Keegan (1992) has used a different approach in studying the settlement of the Bahamas. Choosing the route that seemed to him most likely to have been taken by the first settlers and assuming that they reached its end shortly before their encounter with Columbus, he has calculated their time of arrival in the Bahamas by applying to the length of his chosen route the average rate of expansion in other parts of the world. Simultaneously, Berman and Gnivecki (1994) have established a local sequence of periods for the central Bahamas, have dated it radiometrically, and have inferred the migration route from the close resemblance between the initial assemblages in their sequence and an Ostionan Ostionoid assemblage found in eastern Cuba. Their date of ca. a.d. 600 agrees with the one obtained by Keegan, and their conclusions about the migration route are close to his. Hence, their results, achieved through culture-historical research, confirm his, which were obtained through sociocultural research.

Sullivan (1981) and Keegan (personal communication) have found that at a somewhat later date the Meillacan Ostionoid peoples of northern Hispaniola traveled regularly to and from the Turks and Caicos Islands at the eastern end of the Bahamian archipelago in search of local resources such as salt and turtles. Eventually, Bahamians settled there and traded the commodities back to the larger island.

J. K. Kozlowski (1974) has hypothesized that the Casimiroid peoples of the previous archaic age moved up and down the great river valleys of Cuba and Hispaniola in order to obtain seasonally