c. 500 to 900 CE · Indigenousspan
The dead move out of the plaza and into the house
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For centuries the Saladoid villages of the Greater Antilles buried their dead in the open ground at the centre of the settlement. Sites like Maisabel and Tibes in Puerto Rico were laid out as circles or horseshoes of houses around a cleared plaza, and the graves went into that plaza, where everyone lived around them. From about 500 CE the practice changes. The dead begin going into the floors of houses. Caves and middens continued to receive burials, and the interior of the home became a principal place to keep the ancestors. A change of that kind is a change in who the dead belong to. In the plaza they were the community's. Under the floor they are the household's and the lineage's. Ritual focus narrows to the family, and the house takes over the job the public space had been doing. The layout of a village is a diagram of its social arrangements, and this one was redrawn over a few generations.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.