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2. Culture History: Toward a Revamped Perspective
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Introduction / 7 eral celts that I selected from four sites on the island. This study was conducted by George Harlow (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, American Museum of Natural History) through the use of x- ray diffraction. The evidence generated in this study, supplemented by my inspection of collections housed in several museums of Costa Rica, is particularly informative for evaluating Rouse’s single- migration hypothesis and his assumption of the lack of significant contacts of the inhabitants of the island with those of other surrounding continental regions besides northeastern South America. This information is supplemented with data from similar studies that have been conducted in the Lesser Antilles (e.g., Hardy 2008; Harlow et al. 2006), as well as by newly generated evidence of a jadeite occurrence from eastern Cuba (García- Casco et al. 2009; Harlow et al. 2009; Mendoza Cuevas et al. 2009), which drastically alters the previous notions that we had regarding the panregional distribution of this raw material in the Greater Caribbean. The second consists of the trace element study conducted by Sebastiaan Knippenberg (1995, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2006; Knippenberg and Zijlstra 2008) through the analysis of thin sections and application of inductively coupled atomic emission spectroscopy on flakes, celts, and cemíes recovered from Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles. The results of Knippenberg’s study provide pivotal information regarding the Antillean sources of some of the raw materials imported to Puerto Rico for lithic production that thus allows me to evaluate the nature and geographic extent of the intersocietal engagements recorded through time within the insular Caribbean. The third line of evidence comes from a lithic sourcing study that we conducted in different parts of Puerto Rico, which allowed us to locate some of the main sources of economically important rocks employed in the production of stone implements on the island (Rodríguez Ramos, Questell, et al. 2008; Walker et al. 2001). In addition to these sourcing studies, I make use of the important evidence recov ered from the starch grain analyses conducted by Jaime Pagán Jiménez (2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Pagán Jiménez and Oliver 2008; Pagán Jiménez et al. 2005; Pagán Jiménez and Rodríguez Ramos 2007) on stone tools unearthed from a substantial number of the sites included in this work. Pagán Jiménez’s studies have provided the first direct evidence on the island of the processing of imported cultigens as well as endemic plants, thus eliciting culinary practices and phytocultural interactions that were previously unknown in Antillean archaeology. This evidence is supplemented with the experimental work that I conducted on edge- ground cobbles, an artifact type that is one of the most ubiquitous and long- lived in the precolonial history of the island (Rodríguez Ramos 2005b). Both of these lines of evidence are used to address issues such as the origins of agriculture in Puerto Rico and the insular Caribbean; the possible areas of provenience of the botanical and culinary repertoires recorded on the island; and the implications that the presence of such vegetative complexes have for our current notions about 8 / Chapter 1 the lifeways and dynamics of interactions of the cultivators as well as their anthropogenic alterations of the landscape of the island through time. Although it may seem like a straw- man approach to be evaluating a model that was conceived more than half a century ago, I consider this task to be of utmost importance because this framework is still being reproduced in the major works recently published about the archaeology of Puerto Rico and the Antilles almost exactly as Rouse originally proposed it. As indicated by Petersen et al. (2004:21), “The archaeological taxonomy and classification system used by most Caribbeanists to define and characterize archaeological temporal periods and cultures was developed through the central role and contributions of Irving Rouse. Rouse alone and Rouse with various students and other important collaborators such as José Cruxent, among others, has set the agenda and framed much of the discussion of regional research over the past 60 years. Any discussion of the Late Ceramic Age owes much to his research and publications.” Interestingly, aside from the early efforts of scholars such as Chanlatte Baik and Narganes Storde (1980, 1990) and Veloz Maggiolo (1980, 1984, 2001), among others , there have been few, if any, clear attempts to critically evaluate the main assumptions embedded in Rouse’s chrono- cultural model with the use of the data that...