Rethinking Puerto Rican Precolonial History

by Ramos, Reniel Rodriguez

• ISBN13: 9780817356095
• ISBN10: 0817356096
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-07-28
• Publisher: Univ of Alabama Pr

Summary

The history of Puerto Rico is typically envisioned as a linear sequence of colonizations beginning 500 years ago with the displacement, assimilation, or elimination of diverse native societies resulting from the Spanish entrada, the subsequent importation of African slaves and, since 1898, the hegemony of the United States. However, by focusing on the archaeological evidence of successive indigenous Puerto Rican cultures prior to 1493, this volume challenges predominant cultural historical models of Puerto Rico to reveal a deeper, richer, and far more varied precolonial past of dynamic societies and far-flung cultural and economic interactions with the rest of the Caribbean. The result of this work is a new way to think about, research, and teach Puerto Rican precolonial historiography. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Reniel Rodrguez Ramos is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico-Utuado and Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Leiden.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Culture History: Toward a Revamped Perspective	p. 12
The Method, the Sample, the Contexts	p. 27
Discovery of Puerto Rico and the Lifeways of its Earliest Inhabitants	p. 50
Coming, Going, and Interacting: An Alternative Perspective on the "La Hueca Problem"	p. 88
Horizontal Diversification in Puerto Rico: The Forging of New Identities	p. 145
The Intensification of Regional Political Integration	p. 187
Putting it all Together	p. 210
References Cited	p. 223
Index	p. 265
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