By Reniel Rodríguez Ramos

The background of Puerto Rico has frequently been expected as a chain of colonizations-various indigenous peoples from Archaic via Taíno have been successively invaded, assimilated, or eradicated, through the Spanish entrada, which used to be then transformed by way of African traditions and, considering that 1898, via the us. in reality extra complicated, yet in lots of methods Puerto Rico is still one of many final colonies on the earth. This quantity specializes in the successive indigenous cultures of Puerto Rico ahead of 1493.
 
Traditional experiences of the cultures of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean have established on ceramic reports, in response to the archaeological version constructed through Irving Rouse which has guided Caribbean archaeology for many years. Rodríguez Ramos departs from this system by means of imposing lithics because the fundamental unit for tracing the origins and advancements of the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico. studying the technological types serious about the creation of stone artifacts within the island via time, in addition to the assessment of a list of greater than 500 radiocarbon dates recovered when you consider that Rouse's version emerged, the writer offers a really cutting edge learn revealing replacement views on Puerto Rico's pre-Columbian culture-historical series. by way of making use of a multiscalar layout, he not just not just presents an research of the plural ways that the precolonial peoples of the island interacted and negotiated their identities but in addition indicates how the cultural landscapes of Puerto Rico, the Antilles, and the better Caribbean formed and have been formed via together constituting techniques via time.

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Extra resources for Rethinking Puerto Rican Precolonial History

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In cases where a nonlocal rock is found at a site, its presence might be indicative of a myriad of social processes such as the establishment of equivalences (Polanyi 1968) with the materials and/or information that was provided in exchange as well as the operation of a social and/or ideological structure that justified the efforts involved in obtaining the imported commodity. In other cases, the production of a stone item could depend on par- The Method, the Sample, the Contexts / 31 ticular supernatural conditions that may have presented themselves inadvertently, as Oliver (2009) has argued for the production of cemíes.

Through time, with the influx of other styles of doing stone things and the endogenous reformulations of the original traditions, a myriad of ways of transforming rocks into things were continually devised. Unfortunately, the importance of understanding such technical traditions as important elements in the delineation of Antillean archaeology and culture history has been overshadowed by a focus on ceramics. In contrast, in the present work such technical traditions will take center stage. I herein analyze the traditions by delineating the distinct operational sequences involved in lithic production through time, from raw material selection to the manufacturing protocols by which these were transformed into “humanized” objects (Pfaffenberger 1988:244).

From Shared Norms to Contested Actions One of the main concerns in this work will be to move away from the normative perspective about “cultures” that is ingrained in traditional culture-­historical studies, such as that advocated by Rouse. For Rouse (1992), “cultures” were envisioned as bounded entities composed of the sum of the shared package of cultural traits. These traits were culturally transmitted in the form of ideal norms or mental templates, which governed the behaviors involved in the production of material culture.

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