Reconsidering the lives of the earliest Puerto Ricans: Mortuary Archaeology and bioarchaeology of the Ortiz site.

ABSTRACT: We possess rather little detailed information on the lives of the first inhabitants of Puerto Rico-the so-called "Archaic" or "Pre-Arawak" people-despite more than a century of archeological research. This is particularly true bioarchaeologically, as fewer than twenty burials of the several millennia of the Archaic Age have been recovered, let alone analyzed in any detail. Here, we present the results of archeological, osteological, radiometric, and isotopic analysis of five individuals from the Ortiz site in Cabo Rojo, southwestern Puerto Rico. Study of these previously unpublished remains, which represent a 20-25% increase in the sample size of remains attributed to the period, provides many critical insights into earliest Puerto Rican lifeways, including aspects of mortuary practice, pa

SUBMITTER: Pestle WJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10132640 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature