Paradise Park offered a unique opportunity to investigate two archaeological sites representing both Redware and White Marl occupations. The sites are separated by about 250 m in distance and 500 years in time. This research documented differences in cultural practices in the same environmental setting, and was among the first to identify large-scale environmental changes resulting from pre-Columbian land use practices. This presentation explores the data generated during five field seasons of research at the sites.

Dr. Bill Keegan is Curator of Caribbean Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Over the past 40 years he has directed research on Jamaica, Cuba, Grand Cayman, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Turks & Caicos Islands, The Bahamas, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Trinidad. His publications include the Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology (Edited with C.L. Hofman and R. Rodriguez Ramos, 2013) and The Caribbean before Columbus (with C.L. Hofman, OUP 2017).

Dr. Chris Ellis is Professor Emeritus with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario and is a Research Associate with the Sustainable Archaeology Facility, Museum of Ontario Archaeology, London, Ontario

He is an archaeologist with major theoretical interests in explaining variation amongst peoples who subsisted by hunting and gathering and in improving means of extracting information about past societies from their stone tool assemblages. He has been involved in Ontario Archaeology, and more broadly, Great Lakes archaeology, for over 40 years and has focused temporally on the earliest evidence for human occupation dating in excess of 2500 years ago. He has published extensively on that work in several monographs and many papers. He is originally from Oshawa, Ontario and has an Honours BA from the University of Waterloo and an MA from McMaster, both in Anthropology, but his PhD is in archaeology from Simon Fraser University.