The contributors to Islands at the Crossroads include scholars from the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe who look beyond cultural boundaries and colonial frontiers to explore the complex and layered ways in which both distant and more intimate sociocultural, political, and economic interactions have shaped Caribbean societies from seven thousand years ago to recent times.

L. Antonio Curet is an assistant curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Field Museum; the author of Caribbean Paleodemography: Population, Culture History, and Sociopolitical Processes in Ancient Puerto Rico; and coeditor, with Lisa M. Stringer, of Tibes: People, Power, and Ritual at the Center of the Cosmos. Mark W. Hauser is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica.