Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico

10. Multiple Visions of an Island’s Past and Some Thoughts for Future Directions in Puerto Rican Prehistory

10 Multiple Visions of an Island’s Past and Some Thoughts for Future Directions in Puerto Rican Prehistory Peter E. Siegel My goals in this chapter are twofold: (1) review the salient themes addressed in the previous chapters, and (2) offer some insights into what I think connect the disparate bodies of evidence relating to environment, subsistence, settlements and polities, and religion and cosmology. In the preface, I observed that a book on the prehistory of Puerto Rico is contrived because things that were happening on this island were undoubtedly linked to affairs on neighboring islands and Central and South America. This truism notwithstanding, the chapter authors have demonstrated that from various perspectives there is plenty to say about what happened on Puerto Rico speci¤cally. Some of the authors have explicitly tied the happenings on Puerto Rico to larger Caribbean-wide social, political, and environmental currents. As such, these studies both re®ect and illuminate issues of fundamental importance to the Caribbean, lowland South America, and Central America. This overextended justi¤cation for a book on the prehistory of Puerto Rico may be summarized by saying “we and the Native Americans who occupied the island were and are not alone.” Themes of the Book Numerous themes may be identi¤ed in the previous chapters. I’ve chosen three to address: interaction and social change; subsistence, environment, and social change; and cosmology and social change. Social change is the common theme. Interaction and Social Change Historically, the Caribbean has been thought of as a place intersected by peoples of numerous nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, religious and political views, and agendas of various sorts. Sam Wilson discussed the post-Contact blend of Native American and European cultures, producing a distinctively West Indian social and political context: “the essential part of being a Caribbean person is having a multicultural background” (Wilson 1997:212). This observation is equally valid for the pre-Contact Caribbean as well. Archaeologists working in the Caribbean will probably never agree on rates and routes of migrations. And, we will probably eternally disagree on degrees of autochthonous social development vs. in®uences from elsewhere or successive waves of migration. At least there is agreement on one rather uninteresting truism: at various times in the past, people came to the islands, interacted with those already there, and the ensuing population was different from any of the groups prior to the interaction. Also, as I argued some years ago, I think it’s a mistake to think of large pre-Columbian monolithic cultural migrations into the Caribbean (Siegel 1991a:82–83). A more realistic perspective, perhaps, is to think of families, sets of families, or, at most, the occupants of entire villages moving as groups and establishing residences in new places. For the early Saladoid period (ca. 500 b.c.–a.d. 400), the most easily recognizable material correlate of this process is probably the pottery produced by the artisans of the group. At this level, our mind-numbing debates about names applied to cultural complexes (i.e., Hacienda Grande vs. La Hueca), subseries (Cedrosan Saladoid vs. Huecan Saladoid), and series (Saladoid vs. Huecoid) are meaningless. The hard work of trying to tease out stylistic (or microstylistic?) variation in pottery surface decorations and vessel forms, on a regional level, has not been done. It remains to be seen how Caribbean pottery, and its social milieu, relates to ideas of social interaction and information exchange. Given the complexity in Saladoid ceramic assemblages there is potential to further our understanding of underlying social and practical issues related to the migrations that still preoccupy much of Caribbean archaeology by addressing stylistic variation. Interaction and social change were of fundamental importance at the beginning , end, and during the ceramic age. At the beginning of the ceramic age, we have the interactions that most certainly occurred between Neolithic colonists to the West Indies and the Archaic residents of the islands. These interactions have often been overlooked, largely because of their less-thanobvious traces in the archaeological record. We have a number of clearly identi¤ed Archaic sites in the West Indies, based on radiocarbon dates and 354 / Peter E. Siegel assemblage characteristics (e.g., Ayes Suárez 1995; Harris 1973; Lundberg 1989; Moscoso et al. 1999; Narganes Storde 1991a; Rodríguez López 1997, 1999; Rouse 1952a, 1952b; Rouse and Alegría 1990). Other sites, often referred to as “aceramic,” are not so clear because...