The burials of Tibes, reconsidered

Summary

The 1970s Tibes excavations of the Sociedad Guaynía unearthed the remains of well over one hundred individuals from various portions of what is currently understood to be the earliest ceremonial center in the Caribbean. Despite attempts to avoid burials, more recent (and ongoing) excavations by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes have increased this number to a modest degree. Taken together, the resulting corpus of bioarchaeological material represents one of the largest samples of skeletal material from any prehistoric Caribbean context. Over the past two decades, the skeletal remains from Tibes have been the subject of a variety of analyses (osteological and archaeometric), the results of which are reconsidered here in light of new contextual data and more recently developed understandings of the site’s geological and cultural history. Particular attention will be paid to the results of stable and radiogenic isotope studies of these materials as constrained by data resulting from a rigorous program of radiometric dating.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Recent Research at the Ceremonial Center of Tibes, Ponce, Puerto Rico

Keywords

Spatial Coverage