L. Antonio Curet

The Chief Is Dead, Long Live. .. Who? Descent and Succession in the Protohistoric Chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles

The rules of succession described in the early Spanish chronicles for Caribbean chiefdoms have been used by many scholars to reconstruct a Taino kinship system. This article argues that these conclusions were reached by using unfounded assumptions, especially confusing rules of succession with rules of descent. Furthermore, it is suggested here that Taino rules of succession were not simply about the right to govern through descent but were a form of customary law that was manipulated by chiefs to consolidate and stabilize power. Thus the vagueness present in the rules of succession could have been an integral part of the transmission system of the position of high office among the protohistoric chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles.

Of Flesh and Stone: Labor Investment and Regional Sociopolitical Implications of Plaza/Batey Construction at the Ceremonial Center of Tibes (A.D. 600-A.D. 1200), Puerto Rico

Ceremonial architecture of late precontact (A.D. 600-1500) societies of Puerto Rico consists of stone-lined plazas and ball courts ( bateys ,). Archaeologists use these structures to signify the onset of hierarchical “chiefly” polities and to interpret their regional organization. Problematically, little consideration is given to the costs of their physical construction and the associated organizational implications at local and regional scales. In this paper, we use data gathered through geoarchaeological field investigations to develop labor estimates for the plaza and bateys at the site of Tibes—one of the largest precolumbian ceremonial centers in Puerto Rico. The estimates provide a basis for addressing how these features were constructed at the site and are considered within the broader organizational contexts of incipient polities in the islands south-central region between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1200.

The Archaeological Perspective: Comment on Julio Baisre's “Setting a Baseline for Caribbean Fisheries”

In his paper, Baisre (2010) brings up a series of criticisms that have been needed in the Caribbean for a long time. This article is important not only because of the critiques the author makes on how fisheries have been perceived historically, but because it touches on several methodological problems on how ancient and past human/environment relationships are studied in the Caribbean. As an archaeologist Icancomment littleaboutmost of the purely ecological arguments that the author makes and, for this reason, I concentrate my discussion on those points he makes on the epistemological issues, especially on how archaeological and ethnohistoric data is used in the interpretation of past ecological variables in the region. Since the 1980s Caribbean archaeology has been going through a transformation where new methods and theories have been incorporated into the study of the ancient history of the region. Probably one of the most critical contributions to these advances has been the emphasis on identifying faunal and botanical remains in the archaeological record. Thanks to these studies we have been able to construct a more complete and realistic list of taxa exploited by ancient