It is well known that
a commutative periodic semigroup is a semilattice of one-idempotent (or
unipotent) semigroups. Thus the characterization of commutative periodic
semigroups reduces to two subproblems: (1) the structure of commutative periodic
unipotent semigroups, and (2) the means for putting these together in the
semilattice. In this paper a complete solution is given for problem (1), while
problem (2) is solved for the special case where each unipotent subsemigroup is
cyclic.