The Archaeology of Tibes: Life, Death, and Memory at an Early Ceremonial Center in the Caribbean

Introduction

Life, Death, and Memory at Tibes

L. Antonio Curet and Lisa M. Stringer

THE FIRST BOOK on the Proyecto Arqueológico del Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes, Tibes: People, Power, and Ritual at the Center of the Cosmos, was published in 2010. It shared some data available to date, presented some preliminary interpretations, and discussed several challenges encountered by the research team. While much had been accomplished at that time, it still was too early to begin painting a clear picture of the ancient history of the site, which seems to have been active from approximately AD 500 to 1300. Since then, the project has expanded several excavations, has explored new parts of the site, and has added several specialized studies (e.g., geomorphology, rock art) (Figure I.1 and Figure I.2). As it happens in many research ventures, the evidence collected at that time made us question many of our premises and assumptions, turned many, if not all, of our expectations upside down, and pointed us in a different direction. This new direction made us question many of the basic assumptions held by Caribbean archaeologists. The purpose of this new volume is to continue our efforts to share our findings but also to discuss the nature of Tibes, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, as a ceremonial center and to use the more recent evidence to evaluate some of the traditional views/assumptions that scholars have held for more than a century.

In this introduction, we offer some information as a backdrop to many of the contributions to the volume. We begin by presenting some of the intellectual history of the project, focusing particularly on our assumption of the presence of social stratification in Tibes and beyond. Many of these topics are discussed in more detail within the context of new evidence in the final chapter. Next, two sections describe the geographical, physiological, and archaeological settings. We continue by presenting a brief discussion of the radiocarbon dates obtained by the project. We end with a discussion of the organization of the volume, including short summaries of the chapters.

Figure I.1. Map of Puerto Rico showing the location of the Ceremonial Center of Tibes. (Map by Jill Seagard and Deanna Wood. Courtesy of L. Antonio Curet.)

Figure I.2. Location and distribution of the stone structures at Tibes. (Illustration by Jill Seagard and Deanna Wood. Courtesy of L. Antonio Curet.)

THE TIBES PROJECT AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE CONTEXT OF CARIBBEAN ARCHAEOLOGY

At its beginning in 1995, the main goal of the project was to gain a better understanding of the conditions and processes that led to and shaped the development of social stratification in southern Puerto Rico. This took place at a time when Caribbean archaeology began moving beyond the Cultural History paradigm toward one influenced by neo-evolutionary and political economy perspectives (e.g., Blanton et al. 1996; Earle 1997). The work of researchers such as Peter E. Siegel (1989, 1991, 1999), Samuel M. Wilson (1990), José R. Oliver (1998), William F. Keegan (1991), L. Antonio Curet (1992a), Curet and Oliver (1998), and others were attempts to get deeper into the dynamics of ancient societies and explain the hows and whys of social and political change. Of interest was identifying the catalysts or reasons for the institutionalization of power. Of course, a basic premise of these studies was that most of the islands of the Greater Antilles at the time of European contact were organized in stratified societies, an assumption based largely on the early European documents.

Today, chiefdoms and stratified societies are still at the core of many projects in the region but are being approached from a variety of perspectives. Instead of concentrating on their development and social processes, the emphasis has shifted to how they operated. Project researchers describe details of ancient lifeways at the level of middle-range theory (Binford 1977; see also Raab and Goodyear 1984). Examples of these are the many important studies using modern analytical techniques to study diets, mobility, production (e.g., Laffoon 2012; Pestle 2010a, 2010b), and long-distance trade (e.g., Hofman et al. 2007; Hofman and Bright 2010; Hofman et al. 2010; Hofman and Hoogland 2011; Rodríguez Ramos 2005a, 2005b, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2013; see Curet and Oliver 2021, 2022). Despite these advancements, however, fundamentally, most of the research revolves around the assumption that chiefdoms, homogeneously conceived, were present in most, if not all, of the islands. Again, this is an assumption based on the early chronicles. Some exceptions to this general trend are Vernon J. Knight’s (2020) studies of figurines and Joshua M. Torres’s (2012) social analysis of the region around Tibes.

In recent decades, many of the assumptions, concepts, and categories used by these approaches have been strongly criticized by anthropologists and archaeologists (e.g., Chapman 2003; Pauketat 2007; Yoffee 2005; see also Curet 2003b; Torres 2012, 2013). The critiques focus mostly on their monolithic and universalist view of social organizations, ignoring the wide variability of social formations present in the ethnographic record, and their simplified, and mechanical view of human behavior. Within the context of the insular Caribbean, criticisms concentrated typically on the use of the concepts of chiefdoms, specifically on the application of these categories homogenously and uniformly throughout the Greater Antilles (see Curet 2003b; Knight 2020; Tavárez Maria 1996; McGinnis 1997, 2001; Wilson 1993). In other words, this perspective assumes that whole islands, such as Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, were all divided into chiefly territories, meaning that almost everyone was under the authority of a chief. Many of these critics argued, instead, that, at the time of European contact, these islands included not only groups at different levels of social stratification, but also that they may have shown a variety of other forms of organizations (e.g., various forms of egalitarian or stratified social formations) and identities (Curet 2003b, 2014; Knight 2020; Tavárez Maria 1996; Torres 2012, 2013). This is on par with the findings of modern anthropology and historiography that argue that many factors such as agency, decision-making, and historical events are involved in the development of social formations that may result in the creation of a myriad of social structures and behaviors. This, in the words of Wilson (1993, 2001), produced a mosaic of different forms of social/cultural structures, identities, and political organizations.

Another problem is the lack of concordance between our modeling and the empirical reality of the archaeological record. As argued elsewhere, An example of a possible misuse of the cacicazgo model is the case of Puerto Rico. Following the model developed for Hispaniola, scholars have traditionally described Puerto Rican indigenous societies as organized into cacicazgos. Archaeological data, as well as some documentary information, contradict this view. For example, despite the enormous number of excavations and archaeological projects in the island since the nineteenth century, no one has reported the discovery of a cacique burial or residence. If paramount chiefs with considerable status and control of power existed in Puerto Rico, some evidence should have been unearthed by now (Curet 2003b:23; see also Fitzpatrick [2018] and Pestle [2013b]).

With few exceptions, today this statement can easily be applied truthfully to the archaeology of most of the Caribbean. This more realistic, yet complex view of the sociological panorama of the ancient Caribbean demands the need to identify, define, and empirically prove the sociopolitical organizations of the groups we are studying. Regrettably, despite these cautionary comments made two decades ago, most researchers in the Caribbean have chosen to ignore them and continue using the unproven assumption of the presence of the social stratification.

In some ways the history of the Tibes project mirrors these general trends. The project began with at least two broad and vague assumptions: the first was that Tibes was the seat of one of the earliest powerful chiefdoms in Puerto Rico. The second was that the nature of the site (i.e., a ceremonial center) is on par with the level of sociopolitical ideology of such polity. Undeniably, these two assumptions were based on the chronicles, but also on the ideas of the early archaeologists and historians who had worked in the region (e.g., Alegría 1983; Mason 1941). Yet, as shown in this volume and elsewhere (e.g., Curet 2003b; Curet and Stringer 2010a; Curet and Torres 2010; Torres 2012), years of excavations and research at the site and in the laboratory failed to produce clear or any evidence at all of stratification. This forced us to first deconstruct these premises, rethink them, and revise them. In all honesty at this point the main problem was not accepting the absence of stratification but determining the nature and function of ceremonial centers in general, and of Tibes in particular. If the site was not a sign of the manipulation of the religious ideology by an aspiring or established elite, then what? This was a phantom that hung over our intellectual heads at least since the preparation of the first volume of the project where this dilemma was addressed in its final chapter (Curet and Torres 2010).

It was at this point that the project began shifting its epistemology and reconsidered the research strategy. The decision was made to continue using the field plan developed since its inception of focusing more on low levels of analysis and interpretation that could be compared in relation to other nearby related sites. From this perspective, as Torres argues (2012:Chapter 3), the site is more than a physical locality, but a place of community building for a group of locally situated peoples and also for the creation of shared histories and identities. In other words, it is a socially and historically defined place.

Around 2007 evidence of what seems to have been a devastating flood, dated to the village/ceremonial center transition, began to provide some possible answers on the nature of the site. This flood may have been related to one or more intense hurricanes (see Declet 2014, 2018; chapter 6, this volume) and that we suspect caused ample destruction locally and beyond (see also Curet et al. 2015 and chapters 1 and 2 in this volume for more details on this event).

The project is just beginning to dig deeper on this line of evidence, but a preliminary discussion is presented in the concluding chapter of this volume. However, these discoveries also made us realize how the overemphasis on stratified societies by the project and the discipline makes us forget that people are sometimes just that: people. In this fixation, we forget that as people, the ancient Caribbean societies were concerned with many aspects of being human, including affection, true belief in the supernatural, friendship, familial and social bonds, shared identity and history, and morals. It is our hope that the contributions in this publication help us to expand our views on the nature of the social formations of the region and to reconstruct a more realistic and humanized past.

LOCATION AND PHYSIOLOGY OF TIBES

Tibes is in the south central coast of Puerto Rico on the bank of the Portugués River, just north of the modern city of Ponce, and approximately eight kilometers from the coast (see Figure I.1 and Figure I.2). The site was established on an alluvial terrace off a meander of the Portugués River, and it is limited on the north and east by hills and on the west and south by the river. These limits are physical barriers that protected the site by making accessibility difficult for heavy machinery such as plows. The land where the site is located is a low, fertile plain produced mostly by the deposition of alluvial soils.

From a regional perspective, the site is in a biogeographic and geological transitional zone (Figure I.3). Geographically, the site is positioned between the dry southern coastal lowlands and the semiarid southern foothills or piedmont of the central mountains (Ewel and Whitmore 1973; Picó 1950, 1974). The southern coastal Lowlands is a rainfall-deficient area composed of level, fertile alluvial plains with an average annual rainfall around the Ponce area of 999 mm. However, precipitation is unevenly distributed throughout the year, and severe droughts can occur from December to April. The high fertility of these soils seems to be the result of a combination of excellent parent material and an arid climate, which prevents soil leaching or erosion. This geographic region correlates with the subtropical dry forest as identified by John Ewel and Jacob L. Whitmore (1973), which is described as the most arid area for the whole island with deciduous vegetation characterized by thorny shrubs and trees normally that do not exceed 15 meters.

Figure I.3. Topographic map of the region around the Ceremonial Center of Tibes. (Map by Jill Seagard. Courtesy of L. Antonio Curet.)

The semiarid southern foothills lie between the central mountains in the north and the dry southern coastal lowlands. Geologically, these hills include both plutonic and sedimentary formations of late maturity; the plutonic formations are dominated by diorite and the sedimentary by limestone and sandstones. The average width of these foothills along the southern portion of the central mountains is 8 km. Although the climate of this region can be considered semiarid, it can be regarded instead as intermediate since it is less dry than the dry southern coastal plains with an average annual rainfall of about 1,524 mm (Picó 1950, 1974). The soils of this region are relatively fertile, but the intermediate aridity limits its agricultural production. This geographic region correlates with the subtropical moist forest as identified by Ewel and Whitmore (1973) characterized by lush vegetation consisting mostly of grasses, scrub bushes, and cacti. However, trees can be as tall as 20 m.

The rainy west central mountains (Picó 1950, 1974) consist of rounded landforms of early maturity, with steep slopes, often as much as 40°. They are mostly composed of volcanic and plutonic formations, but hard sedimentary strata are often found, the product of depositions between volcanic episodes. This zone contains the highest peaks in the island including the Cerro La Punta at 1,371 m. The temperatures in this region are lower than in the foothills and lowlands with an average annual of 20.1°C. Rainfall is abundant with an average annual precipitation of 2,413 mm, which results in a more humid and lush vegetation than in lower elevations. Except for some interior valleys and alluvial soils near water streams, the soils tend to be shallow and acidic. Although some parts of this geographic region can be placed under the life zone of the subtropical moist forest, most of it can be classified in the subtropical wet forest (Ewel and Whitmore 1973) that occupies the highest areas of the central mountains of Puerto Rico. This zone is of high precipitation averaging between 2,000 and 4,000 mm. Vegetation is very dense and diverse with more than 150 species of trees, some of which are more than 20 m tall.

Most of the soils in and around Tibes belong to the Jacaguas and Fraternidad series of Puerto Rico (Abruña et al. 1977; González Colón 1984:104–105; United States Department of Agriculture 1979). The Jacaguas series consists of well-drained, nearly level soils on floodplains in semiarid areas very near streams. The soils range from silty clay loam to cobbly clay loam. This series belongs to the Mollisols order that is composed of relatively recent alluvial soils and is considered one of the most productive types of agricultural soils; their reaction range from neutral to alkaline, and they are rich in organic matter. The Fraternidad series consists of moderately well drained soils with little slope and are present mostly on the coastal plain in the semiarid areas of Puerto Rico. The soils are mostly clay formed in fine textured sediment derived from volcanic and limestone rock. This series belongs to the Vertisols order that includes soil types of recent alluvial soils formed from basic rock material, especially in areas where there is a definite dry season. Vertisols soils tend to have high content of expanding lattice clays but are also naturally fertile. Thus, both types of soils are appropriate to produce many crops such as cotton, maize, and manioc (González Colón 1984:105; Roosevelt 1980).

Furthermore, from an island perspective, the region around Tibes is rich in faunal and botanical resources. The most abundant of these are the many species of permanent and migrating birds, but bats, reptiles, amphibians, riparian species (fish, crawfish, and land turtles and crabs) are also present (see deFrance et al. 2010; González Colón 1984; Maiz 2002; Newsom and Wing 2004). However, due to the relative short distance to the coast, Tibes also had access, through direct acquisition or trade, to many marine and littoral resources such as fish, seashells, crabs, sea mammals, and turtles as testified by their abundant presence in the archaeological deposits (see deFrance et al. 2010; Du Chemin and Rodríguez, chapter 5 in this volume). Botanical resources include a long list of tropical trees with excellent wood that could be used for construction material, canoes, fuel, and medicines (see González Colón 1984; Newsom 2010; Newsom and Wing 2004).

Within this context, Tibes (see Figure I.2) is located on a river terrace surrounded by hills and the Portugués River. The general topography of the site slopes gently from north to south. The soils are relatively good for agriculture, but boulders, cobbles, and gravel that occur naturally in some parts of the site make the use of plows or other heavy machinery impractical. Interviews with local people have indicated that the land where the site is located has been used at different times to grow coffee and fruit trees, including oranges, and pasture for cattle. When found in modern times, in 1975, Tibes was covered by thick secondary forests, similar to the ones that grow there today and are composed of native and imported types of trees, including many examples of higuera or gourd trees. Today, the archaeological area has been cleared of the thick forest and a variety of trees native and nonnative to Puerto Rico were either left in place or new ones were planted. Other areas of the property have been left with thick secondary forest or pasture. At the regional level, Tibes is in a geological, ecological, and topographic transitional region in southern Puerto Rico. Interestingly, this prehistoric pattern of settling in transitional or ecotonal areas has been observed, also, for other regions of Puerto Rico, including the late ceremonial center of Caguana (Carbone 1980a; 1980b; Oliver 1998). It has been suggested that these high-diversity areas were preferred by indigenous people to ensure access to the resources available from two or more distinctive geological, geographical, and/or ecological source areas. However, it is also possible that symbolically these groups may have considered these transitional areas as liminal spaces within the landscape. Thus, these areas may have been regarded as spaces charged with numen or cosmic energy where different parts of the cosmos (i.e., natural vs. supernatural worlds or the world of the livings vs. the world of the dead ancestors) overlap.

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF TIBES

Archaeologists learned of Tibes for the first time in 1975 when Efraín Tatito Irrizarry, Luis Ortiz Sepúlveda, and Luis Albertorio, members of the avocational organization Sociedad Arqueológica del Sur-Oeste de Puerto Rico (SASOPR), visited the area in search of new sites (Rodríguez Gracia 1998). After interviewing several local informants, they met Luis Hernández who had discovered Tibes years before and who led them to the site. The members of the SASOPR relayed their finding to the Sociedad Guaynía de Arqueología e Historia de Ponce, another avocational group. The Sociedad Guaynía visited the site later that same year and, under the leadership of Juan González Colón and the supervision of Pedro Alvarado Zayas, began an extensive excavation program at the site. This work lasted for seven years and focused on locating, clearing, and restoring the stone structures and the excavation of many test units (mostly 2 x 2 m units) in different localities to determine chronology and cultural