UC San Diego

Through the analysis of the past, archaeology can con-tribute to the increase of local knowledge for disaster reduction, and to the understanding of vulnerabilities in the present. In this article, we evaluate human response to catastrophic flooding in Tibes (Ponce) and Los Bat-eyes de Viví (Utuado), Puerto Rico, with the goal of extracting lessons from the past to understand social vulnerability at a local scale. In both cases we identified individual cases of sudden flooding and analysed how did the societies living at each locality respond after the disaster. The study demonstrated that, notwithstanding exposure to life-threatening risk, social priorities carry more weight than natural threats in the process of deci-sion-making regarding lived landscapes. This fact will affect the success of risk mitigation strategies that pro-pose community relocation, and must be considered in the design of mitigation plans for the future.