The Godfather of Dominican archaeology pronounces...


This weekend we have been partying in El Cabo and making “los padrinos” of Dominican intellectual society dance bachaton and swig rum with the campesinos…it was the Cabo BBQ, which coincided with official visitors from the Museo del Hombre and the Academia de Ciencias (i.e. knobs of Dominican archaeology). On Saturday we went shopping in Beron for ice, chicken and cola (Juana and the mayor provide the beer and rum and present us with the bill afterwards – it keeps their small colmado (house/shop) in business) and in the afternoon we all piled into the trucks and set off for the site with the Museo taxi in tow. It was a strange caravan – elderly archaeologists (Elpidio Ortega is 80 and investigated the Cabo site in the 70s) and their wives and us lot driving through torrential rain up and impossibly bumpy track to give them a tour of the site and then to cook chicken with the locals. We removed the bars of the fence so that our unsteady guests could clamber over to the large trench and admire the postholes. Elpidio held forth on pottery sequences and mused that there must be a plaza somewhere close by the stones of which the campesinos probably bore off as building material, and I strained my ears and Spanish comprehension to see whether any of his reminiscences and experience could help us unravel the site further.






I spent the rest of the evening barbecueing chicken in Juana’s kitchen in a fire created between some bricks. Checking whether chicken is raw or cooked is hard to do in an unlit kitchen filled with smoke whilst pigs, chickens, cats and dogs run around your feet, but the constant top-ups of cold Presidente beer helped wash the soot out and meant that I could escape the pawings of the local men outside (the alcalde forced me to sit on his gangrenous knee, a position I was very happy to vacate for the other traditional Dominican woman’s position in the kitchen, far from the men’s quarters).



The stereo system is the only thing in the village which claims a constant electricity supply and the speakers blast out ear-splitting dance music (reggaeton and bachata) mercifully loud enough to mask the inebriated mutterings of the local boys. It was a wonderful party – I managed to get away from the kitchen at about 10pm and had a dance or two in a very inept British way, much admiring the fantastic moves of the locals which is a very beautiful sight to see. The BA2 students departed for Belto’s house nextdoor to play dominoes and soon the party shifted there. We intended to leave before it got too late, and before the villagers got out their guns, and the students ended up married, but the downpour started again and the only thing to do was keep on dancing. I hope you can’t get hepatitis from sharing a rum bottle…I think we got back at around 2.30am...

Peter! Did you get back to the Netherlands safely? We miss your spade arm and stories in ElCabo.
But we'll keep you posted on our progress here in ElCabo.

The site is getting more and more interesting and complex by the day. After the 2005 fieldwork we thought that the postholes we excavated belonged to houses from the later ceramic age (Boca Chica), i.e. to a few centuries before Columbus, but now we are excavating more and more areas in which earlier ceramics (Ostinoid) are mixed with the later phase. In terms of my research, this means that I cannot assume that all the postholes (from which in simple terms I hope to reconstruct houses) belong to this later phase, but that we might be dealing with a palimpsest of occupation upon occupation…a most tricky pancake (in the words of Flann O’Brien). We are opening a lot of smaller pits to investigate this relationship between the different phases, which also means we are coming across a lot of goodies – shell pendants, three-pointed stones and even a stone phallus-type object (interpretations never ranged far from this basic one!).

These objects as well as the ornate pottery help the archaeological imagination envisage the people behind the remains.

Yesterday morning before going on site, the whole group visited some of the nearby caves in the area of the site – caves set into the cliffs form the western backdrop of the site, the sea on the east. These caves were the focus of ritual and burial practices in the past – no wonder seeing as they are full of bats and owls and nesting vultures and dripping with stalactites and vaults like huge cathedrals.





little owl for Helena

Some of the caves contain food and ceramic remains as well as evidence for burial (sadly often looted). From the site of El Cabo they are only about a half hour walk and so one could imagine that people living in El Cabo were also those burying their dead in the caves, carving small petroglyphs and carrying out all sorts of unknowable activities there.

Dad, do you know what this is?

today was our day off...we had tropical downpours all day and sheltered under small palm umbrellas on the beach...

Me posing...


Despite the fact that we, a team of Dutch, British and Cuban archaeologists, drive for an hour up a dirt track to a site bordering a village without electricity or water to sieve the earth of their goat pasture, the local people we work with and who regularly hang out onsite (including members of the Marina de Gurerra and the “secret police”) seem singularly unconcerned or unbemused by our activities. I think they think we are bonkers. We tell them the holes we are exposing in the bedrock are the old foundations of pre-Columbian houses and are very interesting. I think we think they are bonkers. They live in El Cabo and think that the rocks we find fall from the sky during thunder storms. It’s nice working with some of them for the 2nd year in a row, they are used to what we do and can excavate and pick artifacts out of the sieves better than we can! Manolo now eats peanut butter (very Dutch), after scorning it as animal shit last year and Belto made a posthole in the bedrock the other day in a bit of inadvertent experimental archaeology which was very useful for me to observe!

The drive to the site is as stunning as ever – sub-tropical forest with lush vegetation and silly ground pigeons (which are like mini wood pigeons and which don’t know how to fly out of the path of a car), the smooth-billed ani which looks like a dinosaur and best of all, the black vultures which circle round the tops of the cliffs early in the morning and late in the afternoon (waiting till the goats jump off the edge or die?) make this almost my favourite part of the day.

We are progressing fast onsite. We will begin to draw the first trench tomorrow. There are about 140 postholes in it. Can’t wait to see (?) how they all fit together….

Melon break...

The first few days onsite were fantastic. Knowing the site already from the work we did there last summer meant that we could get straight to work extending a trench we made last year. Local guys Manolo and Belto worked with us, clearly enjoying the mainly female archaeological team, and we were surrounded by the usual entourage of El Cabo kids...


…not the little goats, but children from the village who are now on their summer holidays and so are delighted to help pick shells and pottery out of our sieves and run off with our trowels.



The alcalde (the mayor of the village) had built us a shed next to his house so that we can store our equipment there and wash finds, and so he can charge us rent for it and marry us off to his friends and family…not the best possible arrangement, but for the sake of diplomacy, one we have to content ourselves with.

8th July. After 4 days everyone is a little burnt and muscles are sore from sieving and trowelling - mine are not seeing as I have done little apart from write find labels and fill in my lists and survey the work from behind the drawing table – ah, the life of an AIO! Alarmingly enough however, my ankles have swollen to the size of small elephant legs (how the tropics have adverse effects on English girls) and so it was with pleasure we got up at 8.30am today instead of the usual 5.15 for our day off. Most of the team took a day trip to Higuey (the provincial capital) and the Cueva de Berna (a cave near Boca de Yuma) to see the petroglyphs.

Seeing as Menno, Adriana, myself, Corinne and Roberto already did this a couple of days ago whilst on a mission to get the key for the school at El Cabo (we use it as a storeroom for our site tools) we made an archaeological tour of the east of the DR instead. This was great as I haven’t had the opportunity to see much of the surroundings yet. First of all we drove to Punta Macao which is a site the Museo del Hombre Dominicano excavated.
The land is now being extensively developed for a nice beach resort with golf course and a view to the mountains (Cordillera Oriental). It is another situation in which the Dominican heritage runs a sorry second behind hole 18…the site (which boasted an indigenous cemetery and is one of the only Amerindian towns mentioned by early Spanish chronicles) is now a bunker.


To cheer ourselves up, we stopped for salt fish, chicken and friend bananas and cold beer in a roadside bar before heading to an area of the Anamuyita river which boasts some Taino petroglyphs (rock carvings).
The petroglyphs were incised abstract and figurative motifs under a layer of cow dung…but beautiful nonetheless. To reach the site we had to clamber over the river using slippery rocks as stepping stones and following José who we picked up on the way and who was a most obliging guide, picking passion fruit for us!




The setting of the carvings, on a flat rock, reminded me of the context of many Bronze Age petroglyphs in Scandinavia.


9th July
another hot day in the field. More postholes and dust, and a greenstone bead! I have a feeling the greenstone items were manufactured at El Cabo rather than imported as finished products as several greenstone flakes were recovered from the sieves today.

OK, I've never blogged before, but I have an idea that it might be a good way to let people know about an ongoing project, like an ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION for example...at least suggestions along these lines from friends and colleagues have prompted me to get this far and explore the possibilities. So, bear with me whilst i take you on a tour of a small corner of the Caribbean...

I am going to try and post pictures and commentaries about the summer season at the Late Ceramic Age settlement of El Cabo (see piccies) on the east coast of the Dominican Republic. The fieldwork underway there is part of a Leiden University project (in conjunction with UCL, the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and Branko Music from Ljubljana University). The title of the project is "Houses for the Living and the Dead" and you can find more official information via the university Caribbean Archaeology webpage:
http://www.archeologie.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=47&c=180

However, there is nothing yet about the fieldwork underway at present. We are a team of 15 in the field - mainly undergrad and Masters students from Leiden, my supervisers Menno and Corinne, Roberto, and archaeologist from Cuba, Adriana, the project postdoc who is currently rummaging through archives in Santo Domingo, and me...the PhD student.