Archaeologists Preserve Jamaica's Past
I N V E R N E S S, Jamaica, July 10 -- — Fragments of 1,400-year-old red claypottery glisten from mounds of dirt dumped beside the gravellybeginnings of a road running through the Jamaican bush over whatwas once a Taino Indian village.
Archaeologist Dorrick Gray plucks one fragment from the darksoil, doing his best to ignore the rumble of heavy trucks and earthmovers.
“If we weren’t doing this, sites such as this would be lostforever,” says Gray, who as chief archaeologist for Jamaica’s National Heritage Trust leads a struggle to protect the traces of past civilizations.
Former Native Jamaican Villages
Since 1996, Gray’s six-person team of archaeologists has beensurveying land and cataloguing historical sites around Jamaica inadvance of road construction and other projects.
Their list of sites has grown sixfold to some 3,000, of whichabout one in seven are former villages of the Tainos — a nativeAmerican people who predated the Spanish and English colonizers andthe African slaves whose descendants dominate Jamaica today.
The team is too busy to do much excavation — the most theygenerally can hope for, after some rudimentary digging, is toprevent the wholesale destruction of a site and note its existence.
With the village near Inverness, Gray and the contractorcompromised: the road couldn’t be moved, so instead it was elevatedonto a 7-foot-high gravel foundation.
“They get the road, but are not digging up the ground under it,so the site will remain intact,” Gray said.
Black Hole of Archaeology
A small step forward in a land where development has tended totrump conservation — a situation that has more than anythinghampered study into the origins of the Tainos.
“Jamaica is virtually a black hole in terms of archaeology andcultural preservation and what we know about the Taino,” saidWilliam Keegan, an archaeologist at the University of Florida.“The government seems to be insensitive to the importance ofcultural heritage.”
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