The Leeward Islands constitute one of the last remaining gaps in our knowledge of the prehistory of the West Indies. There are two ways of filling such a gap. One is to project our knowledge of the archaeology of the neighbouring regions into it and the other is to acquire information about the situation in the gap, as previously done in the neighbouring regions. The island of St. Martin invites the first of these alternatives because it is the closest to the centre of archaeological knowledge in the Greater Antilles. Some researchers have simply applied conclusions reached in the Greater Antilles to St. Martin on the assumption that the inhabitants of the two places must have developed similarly.
The authors of the present volume have chosen instead to study the developments on St. Martin per se in an effort to determine to what extent they paralleled or diverged from the developments in the Greater Antilles.