Living in another culture means you have to change your strategies. In the Netherlands or Britain one waits at a busstop, in a queue if necessary, stamps a ticket and sits down until the required stop. In the Dominican Republic, you ARE the busstop. It’s best to avoid puddles and sharp bends when picking your spot, but anywhere suffices. Once you have flagged the bus (or guagua) down, and no matter how many people are already on the bus, or falling out of the door, you squeeze on, resolutely. There’s no point gingerly choosing the best seat (out of the sun, or away from the man with the chickens on his lap), because there won’t be one, and if there is, someone will soon be cuddling up to you and placing their bags and boxes on you. There is no private space on a Dominican guagua. The best thing to do is sit back (although careful if you have your back crouched against the open door), enjoy the merengue on the radio and buy some sugar cane, empanadas or dulce de leche, shoved through the window at you at regular intervals from a streetseller outside. Buses are generally extremely hot, sticky to the touch and have the motion of a boat on a choppy sea. On the outside they always have some cheery evangelical sticker pronouncing: “Con Dios y el camino”, or “Dios me protege” (which given the number of deaths on the road and guagua crashes is clearly too difficult, even for god).

Paying is another matter. The cobrador (conductor) has what seems like an extremely stressful job to me, but one which they enjoy immensely as it means chatting and socializing up and down the road all day. There must be a system, but I don’t know what it is. At a certain point in the journey, the cobrador moves off the step in the open door, and either by stretching over people’s heads (there is never room in the aisle), or by sidestepping along the bumper along the outside of the bus whilst in motion and poking his head through each window, he collects the fares. The trick is to save all your small change for the bus, otherwise you risk getting back enough greasy notes to paper a bathroom in the former DDR. No one ever has the right change here, so it can be kilometers before you get the right money back, but nevertheless, you do.

It’s no easy feat to get off either, unless you overcome European timidity of drawing attention to yourself in public. But unless you shout “dejame aqui!” in a loud enough voice to beat the radio and the other 50 passengers, it won’t stop.

There is another type of bus here, a bigger one which covers longer journeys and for a few extra pesos you get a numbered seat and the luxury of a DVD. The DVD on the last bus I was on back from Santo Domingo to Higuey was Anthony Santos in concert, a famous bachatero. I was pleased about this as one of my ambitions is to go to a live bachata concert. After the DVD however I had second thoughts. Anthony, who sings such classics as “Llora” and “Anoche sone con ella”, spent the whole concert strutting up and down waving the Dominican flag, kissing women and making them dance humiliating dances in front of him on the stage (“El caballo: quattro patas en la tierra” etc.)…actually, it looked great fun!

A busride here always leave me with a sense of wellbeing and confirms my faith in human nature. You always get chatted to, no matter how rubbish your Spanish (and not always by men), you always get good advice about where and when to change, you need never fear about doing the wrong thing. A ride on a guagua is like a concentration of the Dominican experience which displays the way they do things, in what Benitez Rojo would call “de cierta manera”.

“The earthly paradise glimpsed by Columbus was to be perpetuated, and at the same time debased, in a gracious life-style reserved solely for the rich.” Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Santo Domingo is a city full of painful contrasts: our hotel, it’s colonial period courtyard with its swimming pool overhung with small, ripening mangoes, the miserable sight as you cross the Duarte bridge on the way in or out of the city and look down over the shacks, cheek to jowl, practically sliding into the river Ozama. Millions of people have moved to the cities from the countryside in the last decades, looking for more opportunity (why don’t politicians improve the slums rather than toy with ridiculous ideas like building a Manhattan-style island offshore Santo Domingo for the rich? Yes, it’s easy to criticize in what a recent Listin Diario editorial would call una mentalidad colonialista, but a country in which the processes of the rich / poor breach are so visible is sometimes hard to stomach). People moved from their gardens planted with yucca, bananas, guavas, melons and papaya, their farms with goats, chickens and guinea fowl, their charcoal burning and fishing livelihoods to the temptations of a cash in hand service economy of the cities where their children could become baseball stars and hotel workers. Not that the former is by any means an earthly paradise, but whilst being here I have thought a lot about whether it would be better to live in a village like El Cabo (which is by no means unique) or a city like Higuey or Santo Domingo. I always plump for the former. But probably if I had children, and if I had enough foresight to send them to school to teach them to read and write, and if I knew that I would be forcibly bought off (with a measly sum) my land within a few years, I too would probably move to the city.

Enough of this digression. As usual, when I come to Santo Domingo, I have a list of things to do, and what I think of as plenty of time to do it. As usual I am completely wrong. My mission this time was to collect a box at one place, deliver it at another, buy a few books, sit in a colmado with a cold beer and check out the bachata they are playing in the capital. I should have picked one of these things and been happy about it. I did however make it to the Museo del Hombre. The best bit about the Museo is going behind the scenes at the museum; i.e. Glenis’ office. Glenis is the head of the anthropology department, which also handles most of the archaeology. She is the righthand woman of the director, and her office is a delight. Crammed with boxes from floor to ceiling, mannequins, books, always the odd skeleton laid out on the table and fan blowing (I worry about the smaller bones).

Behind the scenes at the Museum
In the evening, after waving the Slovenians back off to Punta Cana, I went to Jorge’s house. Jorge is my Cuban colleague and friend, doing a PhD in Leiden and lecturing at the INTEC in Santo Domingo. We ate fantastic traditional food in a restaurant joined by his wife Jixsis. We had mafongo (African influenced dish of mashed fried banana and pork crackling), sancocho (poss aboriginal influenced dish of root veg soup and different types of meat), and strips of fried beef. We then procured some cold beer and sat on the edge of Jorge’s pool and talked till midnight. Then it poured with tropical rain, so we sat under the gazebo and talked for several more hours. The hot, smelly 4 hour bus ride back to PC the next day was not helped by this pleasant episode.

Beron, or Veron. In Spanish the V/B are interchangeable. This is the name of the nearest town. It is on the fringes of resort territory and consists of one road, and along this road, on the verges and stretching back a bit, is the town of Veron. It is a town which has sprung up in response to the labour requirements of the resorts. Every day thousands of manual labourers, men (road builders, machete workers, quarry workers), pile into open-sided trucks and old US yellow school busses and get deposited on the roadsides, building sites and quarries of the resorts and development terrains. Every evening they are trucked back again.

It takes about 15 minutes in the truck to get there from where we stay. 15 minutes past the resort golf courses, past the airport at Punta Cana, being passed by Mack lorries loaded with limestone blocks, rumbling on 20 wheels, burping diesel smoke. Daihatsu’s loaded with thirty to fifty labourers at 100km per hour. X4 wheel drives from the resorts carrying tourists and
management.

Never slower than 80. Mopeds loaded with carrier bags and families, weaving through the trucks. Houses, bars, shops. house-bars, shop-houses, brothels, beauty salons, churches, internet/mobile phone shops/houses lining the road.

Beron reminds me of wildlife programme descriptions of inhospitable habitats with amazing evidence for life. Against all the odds, people live in a dynamic community and thrive. This is entirely to their credit, and no thanks to any infrastructural support, amenities or services (I don’t even want to know where the sewage goes, or the number of deaths incurred on the road each year, or the health problems). It is loud, smelly, scary, dirty. It is wonderful, funny and exhilarating. It is a town where you can have the coldest beer in the world, chicken and fried banana whilst almost being killed by an HGV and breathing in as much pollution as 3-pack a day smoker. It is a town where most shops and bars have “Guns and knives forbidden” painted over the entrance and where every shop has plastic tables and chairs set outside and a huge speaker mounted on the wall so you can dance all night (Zaccaria Ferreiras ‘es tan dificil’ and "la Avispa" are this months fave bachata anthems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQVnlzGTKC0&mode=related&search=).

The smells and scenes in Beron will be one of the things I most remember about the DR. Colmado Luis is one of my favourite shops, run by a group of brothers with family photos on the wall behind the cash desk. It is a large concrete shed; against one wall are boxes and crates ceiling high which you have to squeeze past, between the ice freezer and the guard with the gun, and shove your way to the long counter in front of the other wall. They sell beer, cold drinks, murky things in tins, smelly things in bags, rum, sweets in pots and aspirin, cigarettes and shampoo in as small quantities as you want (they decant the shampoo into smaller and smaller bottles and sell tablets by the one or two).

The mayor's children come to play in the coconut tree and sing for us.
Branko 'moving the rope' for the georadar. (Uros carrying radar)
More rope action and a view of half the site.

“No stone left unturned” is a phrase often used to describe the quality of thoroughness related to a task (usually something the police say in a murder inquiry!). It does not literally mean that stones were turned in the process. Stone turning is a major facet of geophysical survey on El Cabo however. I sincerely doubt there is a stone, or a log, or a coconut husk which has not been turned, or kicked, or flicked at least once on the entire site. In fact the daily movement of debris from one survey square to the next, and back again is major task. After a while, you come to recognize certain items which you have, more than once, shifted out of the way of the radar or magnetometer. There is a difference between moving a stone for the 1st time, and shifting it for the nth time; the difference is in the number and variety of species which it houses – ants, spiders, crabs (Belto found a hermit crab in a toothpaste tube cap today), scorpions (not poisonous mum), artefacts, damp, rubbish.

Talking of rubbish (a favourite archaeological pastime) - major rubbish classes encountered in El Cabo are: empty drinks cartons (milk or water), barbed wire, empty liquor bottles (probably mostly rum), old shoes, vehicle parts, old archaeological pins from our previous work, various coloured pieces of plastic, fishing floats and fishing nets and multicoloured pieces of string. This is not to say that the site is cluttered with litter, in fact, as a communal village area, it is remarkably clean. Cleaner in fact of modern non-degradables than of pre-Columbian rubbish, which is everywhere! Smashed and crumbled ceramic vessels, old stone tools (mainly axes and adzes), coral and stone pieces of pestle and mortar, polishing pebbles, food remains (fish bones and shell), all piled in visible heaps. Although to be fair, whereas the current village has existed for about 25 years (I think), the pre-Columbian inhabitants were in the same spot, on and off, for 700 years or so. Enough time to make a bit of a mess.

Data collection can be a very dull process. My job on the site consists of moving a rope 25cm along a tape measure whenever my colleague Igor has reached the end of the rope with his machine (I will take a photo of this so you can visualize it). This process is repeated for hours and hours on end (from about 7am to 1pm). What makes it bearable, in fact, what makes it wonderful, is the sea breeze, the pelicans flapping by, the jokes with our local colleagues, the coconut breaks, cups of water after feeling burnt and sweaty, the view, the quiet, the funny dogs (with ragged ears and thin puppies) and the knowledge that we can do the same tomorrow.
Today we did some ethno-botany in between rope-moving. The locals tell us which plants they use to make medicines and teas and what is good for hangovers, stomach aches, heart problems etc. Menno pointed out some wooden logs which Belto named as: guayacan, piňi piňi and cohoban. All three are tropical hardwoods. All 3 are extremely heavy (and make excellent charcoal). On the outside they look like dessicated old dead driftwood, but inside they are dark browns and reds and smell very fragrant. These woods grow nearby, and would have grown nearby a thousand years ago also, and would have been used in the construction of houses, canoes, fences and sheds and used for craft production and cooking, just as they are these days.
So, as you can see, the monotony of data collection can be relieved in a variety of ways, and leave time to investigate things we otherwise would be too busy for.

A magnetometer would be a fantastic looter’s tool. It is like a sophisticated metal detector which picks up anything with a magnetic field – this includes metal, but also areas of significant burning activity such as fireplaces and hearths, kilns or even pottery vessels (which have been fired). El Cabo site has been looted by collectors for decades (a local doctor employed locals to dig up pots for him which is why they have so many stories about whole pots and burials of “indios”). So when we went to the site today armed with coordinates of some magnetic ‘hotspots’, I felt a little bit like a treasure-hunter with a map saying “X marks the spot”, and had fantasies about burials with decorated funerary urns…scientific fantasies of course (which means that 10 archaeologists read the article you publish, rather than 10 friends look at the pots you have in your Taino art collection)…

We arrived at the site to the spectacle of the Dominican national anthem being sung round the flag by the schoolchildren of El Cabo.

Later that day they gave us another rendition at the edge of a test-pit because we enjoyed it so much the first time. The fact that it is term-time is a little problematic for our investigations seeing as most of the adults and the children who do not go to school (many of them work on their parent’s farm gardens) are illiterate. I was sadly reminded of this when we asked Kelin, a boy of about 12 years old, to move the rope 25cm at a time along a measuring tape while we surveyed the rows. I first asked him if he could read numbers. He shook his head, and went back to using his machete on the weeds. One of the mayor’s children the same age undertook this task for us last year. He went to school, he can read and write.

As for the treasure…we unearthed a chunk of rusted iron at the first X. A salutary lesson. The story behind the piece of rusted iron was interesting however. Belto told us that when he was a young boy, horses used to drag Guayacan hardwood treetrunks to a loading bay (made of iron) on this area of the coast to be shipped. The iron bay contraption was left to disintegrate over time, until we jogged those memories with the magnetometer.

The second spot was more promising (from the POV of our research questions), and may prove to be a cooking place. We will excavate this feature fully tomorrow.

Tropical hardwood burns hotter and longer than European softwood. This is a good lesson to learn before making a BBQ in the Caribbean. We made a fire European girlguide style (small kindling, fanning the flames, larger logs, then charcoal, praying for it to catch) and soon we had a towering inferno which took eyebrows off at 50m. Even when Vitol, one of the locals, raked the ashes down to nothing (really nothing 2mm of dull embers on the sand floor), it burned hotter than the 9^th circle of hell, for hours and hours and hours. The chicken went from frozen to burnt in 3 seconds and scarred the hands of anyone trying to manoueuvre them with a fork a foot long. Still, with Juana's rice and beans (plus cold beer) it tasted good. Menno took the battery out of one of the trucks to power the Mayor's stereo and after dinner we danced bachata (which means the locals performed and the foreigners shuffled). The Slovenians were a bit concerned to realize that they were seen as excellent dance fodder by the local girls. Its just not done for men to sit down when there's dancing to be had, especially if girls are clearly waiting, which they were. El Cabo is a place where one should break one's no dancing rule, I do.

As a result we were on site a little later today. This was also due to the fact that we have apparently been assigned a guard to lead us to and from the site. Ciprian (the guard) even helped out a bit by hacking at some undergrowth with his machete, but spent the rest of the day looking out to sea.

The surveying is going well. We manage about two 20x20 grids with the magnetometer and one grid with the radar per day, and Branko seems confident this speed is sufficient. I'm happy just moving the rope and kicking stones out of the radar's path and chatting to the locals (they chatter, I haltingly reply and compose questions which come out wrong). Like Ciprian, I spend a lot of time looking out to sea. It's one of the nicest things to do on site. Next week however, we will make a couple of exploratory pits to test the origins of the geophysical signals…

Dear readers (i.e. family and one colleague!), yesterday we ventured into the field with the geophysical equipment for the first time. The route to the site is becoming increasingly complex due to the massive construction development activities of the resorts between Punta Cana and El Cabo. As soon as we have crossed one territory, we come up against another, with the same negotiations and bits of paper and miscommunications. Crossing the boundary between a world of pina colada soaked tourists, and neo-classical beach houses with thatched rooves and pefectly manicured golf courses into a countryside dotted with small farms (corrugated iron shacks) surrounded by banana and cassava gardens, tended to by families who sit out under the trees with their dogs and guineafowl is quite disorienting.
On the way to the site yesterday, we were first led up the cliffs inland, above El Cabo to survey the area for sources of clay (which the pre-Columbian inhabitants of El Cabo may have used to make their ceramics). When our guard left us, we got talking to a family of farmers who told us of a site with 'Indian pottery' which was 'just over the road' (sometimes this is true, sometimes this is not). We went with them, and sure enough came across a site, with mounds and shell and ceramic remains in the man's (Feliz) fruit garden. We took some coordinates and collected some surface pieces. Feliz also told us of a cave nearby with more remains, but although we bashed through the undergrowth with him for a while, we could not find it. Nevertheless, more evidence to show that unlike what the powerful landowners say about the virgin territory they are carving out, this area was already densely inhabited 800 years ago and more. We only understand the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reconstructing past populations in the area....nevertheless, we had to move on to El Cabo and get going with the geophysical survey. This we did in the afternoon, setting out the first grids and starting with some magnetometry. All is going smoothly.
Tonight a party with the villagers in El Cabo. More anon.