Ideology and culture change in prehistoric Puerto Rico: A view from the community

Many Native American settlements in lowland South America are physical models of the cosmos. Social behavior, relations of power, and activity organization are structured by how the participants interact with and interpret cosmology. Culture change in the Amazon Basin and the West Indies is rooted in increasingly asymmetrical power relationships and control over ideology. In this paper, I explore linkages between the archaeological record at the community level and ideology to discuss culture change in the West Indies. Anthropological theory, ethnohistorical documents, ethnographic observations, and archaeological data all were employed in this analysis.