Puerto Rico (Other Keyword)
1-13 (13 Records)
The Machuca archaeological site in western Puerto Rico is found in the Añasco river flood-plain, next to one of the presumed ancient mouths of the river, less than half a kilometer east of the shoreline. The first burial was found in a fetal position together with ceramic remains of the Late Saladoid or Cuevas period. Radiocarbon dating on bone collagen placed the burial at AD 550 to 660 (2-sigma calibration) whereas that on charred material found inside one of the pots placed it at AD 650 to...
The Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes: Summary and Recent Discoveries (2016)
This paper summarizes and reviews the results obtained in the past five years of the Archaeological Project of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes. Special attention will be paid to field discoveries, particularly to activity areas and architectural structures. The presentation will also served as introduction to the rest of the simposium.
Assessing Local Variability and Storm Impacts in Coastal Paleoenvironment Models (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Re-Visualizing Submerged Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Developing accurate reconstructions of changes in coastal geomorphology is critical to understanding how past sea-level rise inundated landscapes and influenced human activities. Previous approaches to coastal reconstructions have often been limited to “bathtub” reconstructions that use regional or global eustatic sea-level curve values to...
From Borinquen to Barbados: A Caribbean Cave Art Ritual Complex (2015)
Caribbean archaeology has provided us with evidence of a cultural mosaic that united diverse ecologies, ideologies and identities in sophisticated networks of art and ritual. Caves and cave art were fundamental to these networks. This paper outlines a complex of cave-related ritual activity across the Antilles, supported by art-historical, archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence. This proposed "Cave Art Ritual Complex" may turn out to have far-reaching implications for issues of cultural...
The impacts of cattle introduction in Puerto Rican landscapes during the colonial period (2017)
In this presentation I examine the environmental impacts that cattle introduction had in Puerto Rico by combining geoarchaeological and ethnohistorical methods. During the sixteenth century hides became one of the most profitable commodities to be produced in the Caribbean. For the bigger islands of the Antilles, it has been reported that these early populations proliferated, leading to underground economies based upon their exploitation. Through the analysis of historical accounts and the...
Interweaved Stories of Resistance: A 1985 Ethnographic Collection in Puerto Rico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In December 2019, the University of Puerto Rico's Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte, received as a donation the Waiwai Ethnographic Collection (CRGW), which has survived multiple natural disasters. The CRGW was created by the Centro de Investigaciones Indígenas de Puerto Rico (CIIPR) as the result of an ethnographic expedition undertaken in 1985 in...
Legal analysis of the George Latimer and Agustin Stahl collections: can we or can’t we reclaim, that’s the question! (2016)
In 1874, upon his death, George Latimer bequeathed his collection of archaeological artifacts from Puerto Rico to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In the early 20th century Agustin Stahl sold his collections to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. For many decades archaeologists have hoped to be able to request the return of archaeological collections of Puerto Rican pre-Colonial artifacts located in museums within the United States. These two collections are...
Preliminary ancient DNA analysis suggests a complex origins scenario for pre-contact Puerto Rican populations (2016)
Recent archaeological research suggests that indigenous groups in Puerto Rico stemmed from multiple and continuous migrations of continental indigenous populations. This view is supported by contemporary genetic studies, which have found evidence of genetic affinity between multiple modern Native American groups and the native ancestry components of modern, admixed Puerto Ricans. Overall, these findings challenge the traditional single-migration model for the peopling of Puerto Rico, and suggest...
Puerto Rican Cultural Heritage Under Threat by Climate Change (2017)
As a tropical, oceanic island in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, Puerto Rico is feeling the effects of climate change. Rising sea level, increased storminess, and unpredictable sudden weather events combine with heavy coastal occupation and little or no coherent development planning, to increase social vulnerability to coastal change. The burden of economic problems that the Island is suffering from also increases the complexities of working towards resiliency. Within this context, coastal...
Reassessing the Ballajá Archaeological Collection (2018)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, archaeological research was undertaken in urban blocks of the Santo Domingo and Ballajá wards producing one of the largest collections from within the city walls of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Part of the collection was transferred to the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. This presentation explores the contents of the collection in terms of artifacts, documents, drawings, and photographs. The objective...
Women in 16thCentury San Juan, Puerto Rico: Material Culture and Gender Role Contradictions (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will address women’s role in 16thcentury San Juan, Puerto Rico, through documentary sources produced by the Royal Treasury. Their role made part of the sociocultural transformations that were caused by the intensity of the Spanish conquest in the so called...
Women’s Occupations in Early 20th Century San Juan, Puerto Rico, and its Relevance to Archaeological Research (2018)
Women are one of the many groups which had been traditionally excluded from social science studies. Because of this, when retelling historical events many of them have become invisible and/or silenced even though they played an important role in society. My investigation concentrates on women living in San Juan, Puerto Rico as reported in the 1910 census, in two distinct areas: urban blocks from within, and outside the walled city. Through primary documents, this research will present...
Zooarchaeology of the Vertebrate Fauna of Tibes: Uniformity in Transition (2016)
This paper presents the results of a recent zooarchaeological analysis of vertebrate remains from the Tibes Ceremonial Center near Ponce, Puerto Rico. Two excavation units contained intact and undisturbed deposits with the potential to provide information pertaining to social dynamics and socio-cultural change at the site. Radiocarbon dates from the two units indicate that each archaeological deposit occurred during times of perceived dynamic social and cultural activities on the island. During...