Household, Community, and Power in Precolumbian Puerto Rico

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With National Science Foundation support Drs. Antonio Curet and Lee Newsom will conduct preliminary archaeological survey at the site of Tibes, located adjacent to the southern coast of Puerto Rico near the city of Ponce. Discovered in 1975 the site is composed of a variety of highly distinctive archaeological features including discrete cultural deposits from two periods, middens and twelve stone structures (ball courts, plazas and causeways). Original excavations uncovered two cemeteries and other burials dispersed across the site. Likely Tibes also contains a full range of domestic deposits with the potential to reveal a complex history of space use and community pattern. This civic-ceremonial center is of significant scientific interest because it is the oldest in the Caribbean and may document the rise of a complex chiefdom level of society. The Taino native inhabitants of much of this region formed some of the most complex "pre-state" societies in the New World and Spanish chroniclers, attempting to apply European categories described their organization as "feudal kingdoms."The highly developed social-political organization of these groups was accompanied by an intricate religious system controlled by chiefs who were able to gather labor for communal work or war, and who accumulated wealth and staple products.While much archaeological effort has been devoted to understanding the rise of social complexity in regions of North, Middle and South America the Caribbean has been relatively unstudied. Because islands constitute delimited areas where social boundaries can be clearly defined, they provide an excellent venue for study of individual group development. With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Curet and Newsom will conduct a geophysical survey of Tibes and test the utility of three techniques - resistivity, magnetometry and ground penetrating radar - to determine their ability to locate and determine the nature of buried archaeological features, including hard to locate domestic areas. They will then conduct test excavations to match remotely sensed anomalies with buried counterparts. The information gathered will be used to develop a methodology and set the stage for a longer term project which examines the rise and nature of Tanio social complexity.