BY L. ANTONIO CURET H
urricane Eloise may have been a disaster for many in Puerto Rico, but it was a boon for the understanding of the island’s indigenous heritage. When it
brushed the southern coast of Puerto Rico in 1975, it brought floods and mudslides, but it also uncovered an ancient site buried for more than seven centuries. On the terraces of the Portugues River
on the southern coast of the island, the floods produced by Eloise removed alluvial sediments. After the hurricane had passed, a farmer looking for wood to make char- coal found the remnants of an indigenous culture. Within few years, the Indigenous Ceremonial Center of Tibes, as it was later named, became one of the most important and, to date, the oldest sites of its kind in the Caribbean. Today, Tibes is an archaeological park managed by the City of Ponce with a museum and guided tours. I have been working at Tibes since 1995,
directing a multidisciplinary project that includes a paleoethnobotanist, zooarchae- ologist, paleopalinologist, geologists, geoar- chaeologist, stone tool analyst and a number of volunteers. The main aim of the project is to un-
derstand the social and cultural changes between A.D. 600 and 1100. For many years I have been interested in understanding, not only human behavior, but also why and how this behavior changes. Particularly, I was con- cerned with the socio-cultural processes that were involved in the development of social stratification from originally egalitarian so- cieties. Why and how have societies changed from a condition where most people with the right abilities had access to resources and status to a social organization where these resources and status were controlled by small elite group of people? In theory, this issue goes to the heart of the development of social classes and social inequality. Because of its old age and the presence
Aerial photograph of the Indigenous Ceremonial Center of Tibes, Ponce, Puerto Rico.
of monumental, ceremonial structures Tibes seemed to be ideal for this type of study. The site seemed to have distinct deposits associ- ated with the very early, kinship-based social organization and a later emerging stratified sociopolitical structure. Unfortunately, the site had a whole different story to tell. As we discuss below, after years of work and collec- tion of invaluable data, the results not only disproved our hypotheses but also made it
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 29
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