Southeastern Archaeological Research, Inc.

Department Member, Archaeology

Project Archaeologist

University of Florida

Thesis Title: The Social Construction of Community, Polity and Place in Anceint Puerto Rico ( ca. A.D. 600 - A.D. 1200)

About

How do political institutions emerge?  How are they organized?  How are communities socially and materially constituted?           

These are the primary questions I am investigating as part of my PhD research at the University of Florida.    To explore these avenues of inquiry, my research is centered on the prehistoric societies of the Circum-Caribbean—and in particular the Greater Antilles.  Current archaeological evidence from the region suggests that dynamic social, cultural and historical processes lead to the emergence of incipient polities sometime around the 6th century AD on the island of Puerto Rico (Siegel 1991, 1999).  And while ethnohistoric documentation of these polities on Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic at the time of European contact points to “chiefdom” type societies, our understanding of the social and political dynamics of these early polities is still being developed.   

Within this context, my research explores ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ communities (cf. Varien and Potter 2008) and how people were integrated through political and ritual institutions.  To address these issues I examine the materiality of landscapes and the relational properties of settlement and place as a tool to understand political organization at the regional level.  For my dissertation, I address some of these issues through an in-depth regional settlement survey and study on the south-central coast of Puerto Rico.  In this research I demonstrate how transformations in social practices and identities ultimately lead to the emergence of multi-village communities in the region and the formation of incipient political institutions between the 5th and 11th centuries AD.

My area of study focuses on the region surrounding the Ceremonial Center of Tibes in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Tibes is one of the earliest ceremonial centers on the island (ca. 1 – AD 1200) and there is no other known contemporaneous site matching its architectural complexity. Tibes has been considered the seat of one of the earliest regional polities in Puerto Rico, and perhaps, the Greater Antilles (Rouse 1992).  It is assumed that at its peak (ca. AD 600 – AD 1000) the political landscape associated with Tibes was defined by settlement hierarchies at local and regional levels (Torres 2001, 2005, 2010). 

Yet, controversy exists in the ways in which socio-political power is delegated and the organization of local groups within regional polities. In one model, the regional organization of chiefly polities focuses on the role of singular central places, typically civic-ceremonial centers, as the focal point  from which ideological and political power is centralized and delegated down to subordinate villages. However, there are other sources of power that are necessary to ensure the legitimacy of leadership--particularly at smaller local levels (Crumley 1995; McIntosh 1999).  The first step in understanding the emergence and organization of early political institutions in the region depends on our ability to characterize the variability in the settlement system and the strategies by which villages were organized and integrated (as suggested by Carneiro 1998).

Geographically, I also have research interests in the Southeastern and Southwestern United States.  In addition to my main areas of interest (listed below) I have conceptual interests in phenomenology, ideology and symbolism, island and coastal archaeology, and issues related to the collapse and reconstitution of contemporary and ancient societies. 

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