The Barbados Ridge composes the major part of the forearc region of the Lesser Antilles magmatic arc. The toe of the ridge is almost certainly the locus of modern accretion of sediment from the subducting Atlantic seafloor. The pre-Pleistocene geology of the island of Barbados, which exposes the crest of the Barbados Ridge, is best explained by accretion, implying that the ridge as a whole is an accretionary prism. Important elements of the island geology in this interpretation are the occurrence of much if not all of the pre-Pleistocene rocks in fault-bounded packets and the juxtaposition of age-overlapping abyssal pelagite and continent-derived fan deposits in such packets. The orientation of tectonic structures on Barbados, however, implies that the Paleogene subduction that created the older part of the prism occurred in a differently configured zone from the present one.