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.