Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology of Native Puerto Rico (review)

This is an excellent volume that includes ten articles by specialists on different aspects of the ancient history of Puerto Rico. All of the articles are research-based papers with substantive results and interpretations. Most include a review of their respective topics, useful for students and scholars interested in Puerto Rican and Caribbean archaeology.

Due to its strict laws for the protection of the cultural heritage, Puerto Rico is probably the island with the largest number of archaeological projects in the Antilles. Despite this boom in archaeological research, however, Puerto Rico probably has the worst publication record, with most results included in technical reports that end up in the dusty shelves of many agencies. This volume is a great beginning to right this wrong. As in much of the Caribbean, Puerto Rican archaeology has focused on reconstructing culture history, especially in the form of a lineal sequence of cultures through time; within this perspective, human behavior is simplified. All of the articles in this volume question this perspective by presenting more complete pictures.

Using evidence from stone artifacts and early ceramics, Reniel Rodríguez Ramos begins this revision by reconsidering the role of the early archaic groups and their relationship with the later "agricultural and ceramic" groups from South America. He claims that archaic groups were actively involved in later social and cultural developments that led to the Taíno groups. Similar arguments for the active role of the archaics in history are present in the chapters by Siegel et al., and Susan D. deFrance and Lee A. Newsom. Siegel et al. present evidence from soil cores suggesting that archaic people may have been manipulating and "domesticating" the landscape much earlier than the migration of the South American farmers and ceramists. deFrance and Newsom use botanical and faunal remains to suggest that archaic groups were cultivating local and exotic species. The articles by deFrance and Newsom and Stokes also show that subsistence systems consisted of diverse strategies that included wild resources, cultivars, tended animals, and house gardens.

Several of the articles also demonstrate the complexity of human behavior among ancient groups. Jeff Walker shows aspects of this by demonstrating the intricacy of the archaeological record of Paso del Indio, where human behavior and natural phenomena combined to produce a long and convoluted chronological sequence alongside archaeological assemblages difficult to interpret without a multidisciplinary research program. Using GIS on data from southern Puerto Rico, Joshua M. Torres also shows that social relationships involved in the concept of community as used by Caribbean archaeologists are more complex than once thought, a problem also addressed by José R. Oliver in his study of the Caguana region. Torres argues that a one-to-one relationship between community and archaeological site is not always correct, and that in some cases communities may have been composed of a series of related sites.

The chapters by Oliver and Peter G. Roe show the complexity of ancient indigenous groups by looking at different aspects of the religious beliefs and analyzing them within their social, political, and economic context. The result is an extremely complex system of beliefs that developed from an intricate interaction between people, environment, society, politics, and culture. Finally, the article by Karen F. Anderson-Córdova on early colonial times demonstrates that the Indians were active participants in this scenario and not simply passive spectators. In this review of her work and others Anderson shows indigenous reaction and resistance to European colonization.

It is clear that in editing this volume Peter Siegel chose to be inclusive in terms of the topics to be included. The book covers a large amount of information and includes a wide variety of topics that as a whole is a good sample of what we have learned of the ancient history of the island. This reviewer's only reservation with the book is the absence of studies on human remains and mortuary practices such as the...