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.