Very irresponsible of me to get lazy with the blog just as Hurricane Dean swept by. No one seemed duly concerned however, and yes, we survived with no more than a few miserable gusts and rain bursts Punta Cana direction. We had plenty of tins in the cupboard and a concrete building to shelter in the advent of a worse landfall, and had fantasies about being caught out by the cyclone whilst in the field and having to shelter in a cave with the El Cabo inhabitants, their generator and plenty of rum. Naturally, in horrible reality, this would have been no Taino-style party (the early Spanish chronicles mention caves used as refuges in Hispaniola) and hurricanes produce the most catastrophic disasters nowadays, especially for those dwelling in flimsy constructions in coastal cities of the Caribbean (as I learnt from Lisa, my paleotempestologist friend from Virginia Tech and also from the stories from the people in El Cabo about what happened in 1998 when a hurricane ripped through the east of the country), but it did produce several interesting discussions and musings on the way knowledge and strategies about what to do and how to explain hurricanes and other violent weather events were passed on in precolonial times – we have clues of this from rock art and Taino myths relating to rain and storms and also from the places chosen to settle and the way houses were built. In El Cabo for example, I have an idea that in the advent of a cyclone, which people would have seen coming out to sea, the house could have been laid flat by taking the largest posts out of their sockets, and then evacuating everyone to the caves in the cliffs behind. Storm over (could be a matter of days, and judging from the pottery remains in some of the caves, they were equipped), you could come back, and slot the posts back into the holes – this is one of the advantages of houses on the rock over houses on the sand (what was that parable again?!).