Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology

144 / Valcárcel Rojas and Rodríguez Arce
the children and the great majority of the burials with objects are located
there. Since the dated skeletons are located in this area, this symbolic value
must have been acknowledged for the whole range of the site’s occupation.
In the cemetery of El Chorro de Maíta, the burials are not marked, and
many times they are disturbed by other burials, suggesting that the most important
thing is to place the body in this special location and not a speci¤c
position within it. According to Bloch and Parry (1982; cited by Curet and
Oliver 1998:228), this low level of individualization of the dead is related to
communal practices intended to reinforce the symbolic unity of the group.
Another element that supports the communal character of the cemetery is the
fact that some individuals were buried in a careless manner and in positions
(such as supine) that perhaps suggest rejection or disapproval of some individuals.
It is also signi¤cant that the presence of women is common, when it
would be expected (based on ethnohistorical analogy) that they did not control
any position of power in these communities. Such situations and the limited
number of ornamental objects indicate that people with a wide range of
social status were buried in this cemetery and not only the elite.
The presence of cemeteries in centralized, unformalized spaces and the
lack of individual grave markers at Saladoid sites in Puerto Rico have been
considered as evidence of egalitarian social relationships (Curet and Oliver
1998:229). In the case of El Chorro de Maíta, the possibility of a similar
situation, at least in certain elements of the social structure, has also to be
evaluated.
DISCUSSION
The cemetery of El Chorro de Maíta shows the coexistence of forms of institutionalized
social inequality and elements of community cohesion, characteristic
of egalitarian groups. Elements of egalitarian pro¤le are associated
with the structure of the burial area and are temporally consistent with the
other features. They consist of the nonformalization of the cemetery and the
individual burials and in the leveling effect associated with the act of locating
all the burials in a common space. Inside the cemetery are people with sumptuary
and symbolic objects that distinguish them from the rest of the population.
These burials appear early on, but it is unclear when children accompanied
with such objects began to be buried in this area as an expression of
the process of hereditary status transmission and of the institutionalization of
social inequality.