L. Antonio Curet has dedicated his career to studying the social, economic, political, and ideological process involved in the development of stratified societies in the Caribbean. He has concentrated on studying the nature, size, and organization of households at the site of Tibes using differences in access to resources through time and space as a major piece of evidence. 

To date, Tibes is the earliest civic-ceremonial center in the Greater Antilles; it seems to represent one of the earliest political and economic centers of institutionalized stratification in the region. Tibes is ideal for studying such types of centers due to the presence of distinct deposits at the site associated with very early, kinship-based social organization and a later emerging stratified sociopolitical structure.

When Columbus arrived at the Caribbean islands, the indigenous people were organized into some of the most elaborate "pre-state" societies in the New World. These stratified societies were organized without the clear presence of the social classes and bureaucratic structure that were characteristic of a state. However, these societies already showed the presence of formal positions of leadership and an elite group composed mostly of relatives of the leader. This form of socio-political organization was the result of a long process that involved migrations, inter-group interaction, control of religious ideology, and adaptation to island environments.

Dr. Antonio Curet Interview
"What most people don't realize is that most of what we know about the development of social stratification and inequality has been learned from regions of the world where states and empires developed, such as Mesoamerica, the Andes, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. This knowledge, although important, is biased by the eventual development of large political units. However, little is known about how the transition from egalitarian/village life to stratified/regional political units occurred in areas where the state did not appear until the arrival of Europeans."

"It is in these pre-state societies that the germ of social classes and bureaucracy are first present and where the clues of how and when social hierarchy and inequality developed can be found more clearly."

To learn more about how egalitarian villages made the transition into stratified states, check out The Ancient Americas Transition to Leadership Video, featuring Dr. Antonio Curet.

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