Archaeologists Preserve Jamaica's Past

I N V E R N E S S, Jamaica, July 10, 2000 -- — 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.”

In addition to the damage wrought by construction, “there hasalso been a tremendous loss along the beaches and coves where[Taino] villages were located…foreigners come down and buildvacation houses and then everything is lost.”

Most excavations in Jamaica, and they are relatively few, arecarried out by American universities.

Government officials, who are more concerned with Jamaica’s high murderrate and providing essential services like education and health, saythey are striving for a balance — but most refuse to address, on therecord, an issue perceived as sensitive.

“This is a country that is slowly beginning to understand theneed for archaeological exploration,” said former Trust directorAinsley Henriques. “Perhaps [Jamaica] is not doing it fast enough.How much has been lost in the mining of bauxite? We don’t have aclue.”

Hints of Culture Remain

Little is known about the estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Tainos wholived in Jamaica, which they called Yamaye. Within two centuries ofColumbus’ arrival, the Tainos who inhabited the Caribbean had beenslaughtered or enslaved. Their traces have all but disappeared. Hints oftheir culture remain, such as in the English word “barbecue,”which they used to describe the rock slabs on which they cookedbread.

Gray said he thought the 10-acre Inverness site, discovered inDecember, may reveal something about “the interaction between theTaino and Spanish,” who dominated the island from Columbus’arrival in 1494 to the British takeover in 1655.

Dirt floors of Taino dwellings and a few chunks of Taino potteryand Spanish ceramics have been found at the site. Holding the Tainopottery in his palm, Gray compared it with a piece from the morerefined blue-and-white 17th-century Spanish “Delph Ceramics” found in the same pile of dirt.

“We have to balance the country’s need for economic development and cultural preservation,” Gray said. “The hope is that we can preserve a site like this until someone with the necessary resources decides to do the work.”