Multiple visions of an Island's past and some thoughts for future directions in Puerto Rican prehistory

My goals in this chapter are twofold: (1) review the salient themes addressed in the previous chapters, and (2) offer some insights into what I think connect the disparate bodies of evidence relating to environment, subsistence, settlements and polities, and religion and cosmology. In the preface, I observed that a book on the prehistory of Puerto Rico is contrived because things that were happening on this island were undoubtedly linked to affairs on neighboring islands and Central and South America. This truism notwithstanding, the chapter authors have demonstrated that from various perspectives there is plenty to say about what happened on Puerto Rico specifically. Some of the authors have explicitly tied the happenings on Puerto Rico to larger Caribbean-wide social, political, and environmental currents. As such, these studies both reflect and illuminate issues of fundamental importance to the Caribbean, lowland South America, and Central America. This overextended justification for a book on the prehistory of Puerto Rico may be summarized by saying "we and the Native Americans who occupied the island were and are not alone.".