With the support of the National Science Foundation, an interdisciplinary team of Puerto Rican and American archaeologists, geomorphologists, paleoethnobotanists, and zooarchaeologists will conduct a two-year program of research at the Ceremonial Center of Tibes, Puerto Rico. The ultimate purpose of the research is a more refined understanding of the processes involved in ancient social changes seen in Puerto Rico, an understanding which may then be applied to the development of social inequality in other regions of the world.
At the time of European conquest, many of the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico were organized in stratified societies that have been described by modern anthropologists as chiefdoms. These stratified societies had developed locally in Puerto Rico from earlier egalitarian groups through a series of socio-cultural changes that took place over more than 4000 years of occupation. As social inequality was established in an institutionalized manner, ceremonialism and differential access to resources, status, and power intensified.
To develop a robust picture of past social organization and change in Puerto Rico, this project will focus on studying ancient households' economy, organization, composition, and meaning. As the dynamics of social inequality play out on the scale of both individuals and societies, the present study aims to take a "bottom up" rather than "top down" approach and examine the development of social inequality from the perspective of individuals and households
In order to accomplish these goals, a rigorous field methodology will be employed to uncover domestic areas by excavating extensive areas of the site. As excavations proceed, archaeological material and soil samples will be collected for the analysis of various kinds of artifacts and the identification of botanical and faunal remains. Moreover, geomorphological studies will be conducted to better understand how soils formed and how humans impacted the general landscape of the site.
The intellectual merit of this project is twofold: First, it seeks to study the in situ development of social stratification in a part of the world that has traditionally received short shrift. While a great deal of research has been directed at understanding the causes and consequences of increasing social hierarchization in regions like Mesopotamia, Mexico, and the Andes, comparatively little effort has been expended in regions such as the Caribbean. Second, by using a rigorous methodology, the project will provide more fine-grained data that can be used for both theory-building and testing.
The proposed project will have a broad impact at least in two ways. First, the project will include an educational component allowing Puerto Rican and American students to participate during the sampling and analytical stages. Second, educational activities will also be extended to the general public since the site is in an archaeological park with a museum and it is visited by thousands of people every year. The information obtained will be incorporated in their exhibits, brochures, and catalogs. Lectures and small temporary exhibits will also be offered.
The question on how and why stratified societies and social classes developed is one that has been of great importance to the Social Sciences since their inception. The objective and goal of this project was to make an impact in the scholarly debate dealing with this issue. When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he found highly stratified societies with a central leader that the natives called caciques and anthropologists later called chiefs. Despite their hierarchy and centralized power, however, these were not state level societies and their social strata could not be considered social classes. Nevertheless, the seeds of both were present there. While these questions have been studied by many disciplines, archaeologists have approached it from a unique perspective that does not rely on biased written documents, but on their material remains, and that does not limit its view to a few decades, but to long periods of times. In studying these social developments, archaeologists make use of certain markers that may indicate the presence of stratification and centralization of power. Some of these are: centralized distribution of settlements across the landscape with a large one in the center surrounded by smaller sites, the presence of monumental architecture, the presence of ceremonial centers, and an uneven distribution of some resources such as valued food, exotic materials, and high status objects. The Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes sprout from our interest on gaining a better understanding of the developments of social stratification in the Caribbean. Tibes was selected because is the earliest ceremonial center with monumental architecture in the region and because it also includes remains from earlier, egalitarian groups. Thus, it is a perfect place to see the transition from non-stratified to emerging stratified groups. Our intention was to study these changes from the perspective of the household, expecting to find some houses that lost access to some resources through time, while other gained access to more and different types of resources. The funds provided by this grant allowed us to excavate multiple areas of the site and conduct detailed analysis of many of the findings including animal and plant remains, soil samples, charcoal, and geomorphological evidence. We were able to uncover not only evidence directly related to our research question, but some unexpected one. In general, and to our surprise, no strong evidence of social stratification (e.g., high status object, exotic goods, and concentration of highly valued goods in particular areas of the site) was found throughout the site. In fact, most of our finds could have been found in any site of the Caribbean. This result is forcing us in many ways to evaluate our premises and how we saw ancient societies of the Caribbean. These results combined to others are strongly suggesting that the traditional views of ancient social organizations and the processes involved in their development are too simplistic and are challenging us to seek for more realistic and sophisticated explanations of what seem to have been complex processes. Now we are seeing that factors other than power could have been involved in the development of ceremonial centers. This is suggesting that the traditional view relating the emergence of ceremonial centers with monumental architecture as the product of processes of centralization of power and social hierarchization may not be correct. The lack of this type of processes in Tibes and other early centers tend to suggest that their development were not the product of social stratification, but, on the contrary, they may have been a dynamic "ingredient" in those processes. Finds not related to the main research question include: the first evidence in the Caribbean of metastases bone cancer in human remains, the first archaeological evidence of cohoba a hallucinogen used in ceremonies, and evidence of a high-energy flood that may have deviated the course of the river between sometime between A.D. 900 and 1100. The project also had an impact broader the scholarly one. Particularly, the project was able to include as participants a large number of students from different backgrounds, including graduate and undergraduate students from Puerto Rico, U.S., and Colombia. Many of these students where from groups underrepresented in American archaeology. These students were trained in field and laboratory technique, data recording, digitizing, and management, and other skills essential to archaeologists. In addition, during fieldwork students had to attend to lectures at nighttime. Another broader impact was programing developed in partnership with the administration of the Parque Indigena de Tibes and the City of Ponce, steward of the site. These included giving lectures and interacting with the public in general.
