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 activi ty organization are structured by how the participants interact with a nd interpret cosmology. Culture change in the Amazon Basin and the Wes t Indies is rooted in increasingly asymmetrical power relationships an d 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, ethnohistor ical documents, ethnographic observations, and archaeological data all were employed in this analysis.