Leiden University

Department Member, Archaeology

Other Affiliations: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, Arqueología
Universidad de Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, Biology

About

Soy de Aibonito, Puerto Rico (un pequeño pueblo en medio de la isla). Doctor en Antropología (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México); Arqueólogo y Paleoetnobotánico con interés especial en el Neotrópico isleño, así como en el surgimiento y desarrollo de las culturas botánicas del Circum-Caribe.
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I am from Aibonito, Puerto Rico (a small town in the middle of the island). Doctor en Antropología (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México); Archaeologist and Paleoethnobotanist with special interest in Island Neotropics and the rise and development of "botanical cultures" within the precolonial Circum-Caribbean.

"Research accomplishments and interests"

During the past two decades, I have been fortunate to be able to work in different branches of archaeology.  Although my research during this time has delved into diverse aspects of the discipline, it has concentrated on two major issues, both of which are of transcendental importance in contemporary archaeological thought: (a) the domestication and early dispersal of crops in the Neotropics and its ensuing phyto-cultural interactions, and (b) the sociopolitical contexts in which global archaeological practices are being performed. Concerning the first scenario, I have carried intensive archaeobotanical studies on two of the earliest archaeological sites in the insular Caribbean, which have demonstrated for the first time that some of those so-called “Archaic” peoples from the Antilles where the first societies of the Neotropics that incurred in long-distance maritime translocations of exotic domestic plants and crops (e.g., maize, bean, manioc, sweet potato), and managed various native Antillean wild plants such as corozo (Acrocomia media) and Zamia. This line of research, based on ancient starch grain analysis, has offered a radically different panorama about the lifeways of the earliest inhabitants of the insular Caribbean from what was conventionally understood for decades in the area. These data and my interpretations, together with other archaeobotanical studies developed at later archaeological contexts of the Antilles, have seriously challenged many of the fundamental notions regarding the development of agro-economic subsistence strategies, human adaptations to island environments, and socio-cultural change within and across the different precolonial periods defined up to date in the islands.

The Antilles has been usually seen as a marginal space for the development of important historical processes such as the origin of agricultural practices and the dispersal of domestic plants in the Neotropics. However, research carried out by me and other colleagues in the Antilles and French Guiana strongly suggests that the archipelago played an important role in the far flung maritime dispersal of domestic plants and botanical traditions. The following research questions synthesize my previous and current interests related to the rise and development of precolonial botanical cultures in the Neotropics: What are the temporality and the vectors of distribution of early botanical traditions in the Neotropics, including the Antillean islands? What are the social mechanisms behind these processes?  What was the role of maritime societies in crop dispersal between the different regions? How these processes shaped people’s cultures and their ways of interacting with others and with the environment through space and time? How important wild plants were apprehended and valued as crops? What roles these plants and other crops played in the intensification of agricultural practices and, ultimately to the emergence of complex societies?  Other research interests derived from the themes commented above concern human behavioral ecology, historical ecology and phytogeography in the Neotropics. The methodological orientation of my research activities intend to apply starch grain analysis to human teeth as well as to clay, lithic and shell artifacts, together with the analysis of archaeological materials by more complimentary techniques such as Gas Chromatography, Isotopes, and X-Ray Diffraction. Other archaeobotanical techniques based on macro- and microbotanical remains (e.g., pollen, phytoliths) are to be employed in further research.

More research interests previously explored in my career and intimately related to the themes summarized before are the study of human landscapes and how people and cultural-natural things actively interacted for producing meaningful worlds and narratives of “being-in-the-world” as it can be interpreted by the analysis of cultural objects such as tools, plants, spaces for daily practices, and for special purposes. In this context, I am also particularly interested in the study of the multifaceted and multivectorial interactions that took place between the precolonial Caribbean island peoples and others of the continental surroundings, or what is geographically known as continental Circum-Caribbean. It should be clarified that my work is not focused only in the study of inter- and intra-island multivectorial interactions, but more importantly in pan-Caribbean interaction networks and how these dynamic and fluid frames for human action constantly re-shaped the social and cultural life of communities and things, as well as the diverse identities in this vast region through time. It is by these means that the Isthmus of Panamá region plays an important role in my research agenda, taking into account that previous archaeological and paleoethnobotanical research situate that region as an important constituent of the Caribbeanscape at different points in time. Thus, my research interests are directed to re-assess and to develop new knowledge on the multifaceted interrelations within the Caribbeanscape (including the Isthmus) and adjacent geographical and inter-connected territories, such as Northwestern and Northeastern South America.

I have also been actively engaged in the analysis of contemporary debates regarding the sociopolitical contexts of archaeological praxis. Situating Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries as vivid examples of political and/or intellectually marginalized scenarios in relation to the archaeological establishment articulated by central knowledge production arenas, I have questioned the so-called postcolonial template in which all the World’s archaeological practices are being situated by many scholars in recent years. In a synthetic paper published in the Journal of Social Archaeology (June 2004), I demonstrated that not all of today’s archaeology falls within the parameters of the postcolonial condition (as has been promoted by scholars like Chris Gosden, and Ian Hodder among many others). My interpretations on the sociopolitical performance of past and contemporary Archaeology have been well received and now postcoloniality in our discipline is being re-contextualized by centric and eccentric archaeologists around the World.

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