Welcome!

We start off our speaker series with Puerto Rican archaeologist and National Museum of the American Indian curator, Antonio Curet with his talk entitled, "Life, Death and Remembering at the Center of the Cosmos".

He enters the class conversation after a set of introductory weeks that framed the historical context, anthropological concepts and contemporary stakes of a undergraduate course on Puerto Rican culture in a North American classroom in our current moment.

This week, the class turned to thinking about the establishment of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 1955 as a seminal moment in defining traditional visions of the island's cultural identity particularly in terms of the pioneering contributions of anthropologist, Ricardo Alegría and more specifically, in how the island's indigeneity has been historically narrated. 

During this talk, Curet juxtaposes an object overview of the island's cultural phases based largely on ceramic styles with his long-term fieldwork research at the archaeological site of Tibes.  He candidly considers the ways in which his over 20 years of interpretations of ancient socio-political organization have critically changed and brought him to rethink the dominance of the concept of chiefdoms in Puerto Rican archaeology. Emphasizing the value of multiple lines of evidence through a cable metaphor, Curet concludes by appreciating the surprising ways in which the archaeological record carries timely lessons about social memory and public monuments after catastrophic moments of environmental disaster. 

- Amanda Guzman

To learn more about the archaeological park of the Centro Ceremonial Indígena de Tibes.

To learn more about Curet's academic work.

Indexing work completed by Trinity undergraduates, Ray Alvarez-Adorno and Carolina Villasenor. To access the indexing chapters for this talk, click the icon at the top left of the video.

Note: There are brief descriptions and small depictions of ancient human skeletal remains in the latter half of the presentation.