Peter E. Siegel

Biography

      From the mid 1980s to early 1990s, Siegel worked for the Centro de Investigaciones Indígenas de Puerto Rico, a private non-profit research foundation. During that time he directed excavations and analysis of Maisabel, a large ceramic-age site located on the north-central coast of Puerto Rico. In 1992, he received his PhD in anthropology from SUNY Binghamton. Among others, Irving Rouse and Anna Roosevelt served on his dissertation committee. For the next 14 years Siegel worked for a private consulting firm, John Milner Associates, which provides professional services in historic preservation, archaeology, architecture, and heritage management.

      Currently, Dr. Siegel is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ. His research interests include lithic usewear analysis, ethnoarchaeology, evolution of complex society, and spatial analysis. Geographically, he has conducted archaeology in lowland South America, the Caribbean, and eastern North America.

Abstract

Dual Organization, Circular Communities, and the Evolution of Caribbean Chiefdoms

      In 1948, Ben Rouse described “ceremonial structures” in the Greater Antilles as “large flat areas alongside the refuse deposits, either circular, oval, or rectangular in shape and lined with embankments, faced in some cases with upright stone slabs. These are called ‘ball courts,’ although many of them may have served primarily as ceremonial plazas, and several are so long and narrow as to resemble roads.” Sixty years later, Caribbean archaeologists are still addressing the civic-ceremonial aspects of the plazas, explicitly linking them to sociopolitical affairs of the Taínos. In this paper, I will trace the evolution of village organization from the Saladoid (early ceramic-age) circular communities to the Taíno civic-ceremonial centers. I will relate this evolutionary process to changes in social and political organization and conceptual shifts in world order.

      To place this discussion into a broader hemispheric context, I will explore the structural implications of circular communities in selected areas of lowland South America, the West Indies, and North America. In some contexts, “dualistic systems of social thought” ( Maybury-Lewis 1989) are processes of fundamental importance in social reproduction and change. In most cases, this form of analysis can be applied to the archaeological record only when there is a body of appropriate ethnographic or ethnohistoric data.

      Paper to be presented at the Ben Rouse Memorial symposium, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven. April 20-21, 2007.

Peter E. Siegel
Department of Anthropology
Montclair State University
Montclair, NJ 07043