alice's bloggie

2008-11-25T05:11:00.000-08:00

Please click on the titles to be taken to the pdf.

PUBLICATIONS

Samson, Alice V. M. and Bridget M. Waller: 2010. Not growling but smiling: New interpretations of the bared-teeth motif in the pre-Columbian Caribbean. Current Anthropology 51 (3), pp.425-433.

Samson, Alice V. M. 2010. Renewing the House: Trajectories of social life in the yucayeque (community) of El Cabo, Higuey, Dominican Republic, AD800-1504. PhD dissertation, Leiden University. Sidestone Press. Leiden. (the book can be ordered through http://www.sidestone.com/ or http://www.oxbowbooks.com/)

Samson, Alice V. M. in press: House trajectories in El Cabo, Dominican Republic: The building blocks of Late Ceramic Age culture. Submission for the proceedings of the XXIII Congress of IACA, Antigua and Barbuda, June 29 – July 3 2009.

Hofman, Corinne L., Hoogland, M.L.P. Samson, A. V. M and Oliver J.. 2008: Investigaciones arqueológicas en El Cabo, oriente de la República Dominicana: Resultados preliminares de las campañas 2005 y 2006. Boletín del Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 42.

Samson, Alice V. M. and Menno L.P. Hoogland. 2007: Residencia Taína: Huellas de asentamiento en El Cabo, República Dominicana, El Caribe Arqueológico, 10, pp. 93-103.

Hofman, Corinne L., Hoogland, M.L.P., Oliver, J. and Samson A.V.M. 2006: Investigaciones arqueológicas en El Cabo, oriente de la República Dominicana: resultades preliminaries de la campaña de 2005. El Caribe Arqueológico, 9. Santiago de Cuba, pp. 95-106

Samson, Alice V. M. 2006: Offshore finds from the Bronze Age in north-west Europe: the shipwreck scenario revisited. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 25.4.

Hofman, Corinne L., Hoogland, M.L.P., Oliver, J. and Samson A.V.M.: Archaeological investigations at El Cabo, eastern Dominican Republic: preliminary results of the 2005 campaign. Unpublished report.

Samson, Alice V. M. 2005: Bronze Age seafaring: some thoughts on social and ideological implications. SOJA conference proceedings.

in press. Hofman, C.L., Boomert, A., Bright, A., Hoogland, M.L.P., Knippenberg, S. and Samson, A.V.M.: Ties with the "Motherland": archipelagic interaction and the enduring role of the South American mainland in the pre-Columbian Lesser Antilles. Curet, L.A. (ed), University of Alabama Press.

Alice's CV

2008-08-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

95 boxes loaded into a lorry. the sum total of 4 years of excavation in El Cabo. Manolo and his girlfriend Margarita were also in the Ecological Foundation carpark to witness the archaeological village stacked in beer boxes, ready for transportation to the Museo del Hombre. Burials on top to avoid crushing on tight bends. It was quite a poignant moment, for me at least, and also an achievement and seemed to mark the end of a 4 year relationship we have had with a very special place in the Dominican Republic. as if the boxes of shell, stone and coral, represented boxes of memories containing the village and the people we know now because they are the product of our collaboration.

2008-08-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

last day in the field, after a survey and a swim

2008-08-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

Noortje only likes one type of box – Presidente boxes, capable of holding x24 65ml bottles. This is the national brand of beer. These are big and strong enough to hold large amounts of archaeological material and still be lifted (just). One of the aims of this fieldseason is to pack everything we have excavated over the last 4 years, and send it to the museum in a big lorry. This material fills 100 Presidente boxes. A lot of shell, stone, bone, pottery and coral.

The streets of Beron are awash with rubbish – cardboard, plastic, old shoes, food remains scavenged by mangy mutts, and the only thing people drink next their rum, is Presidente. Hence this is the ideal and most widely available box type in the country…you would think.

Every day for the last 2 weeks, delegations from our group have been sent into Beron to scout for boxes. We visitied every supermarket in the entire town from Supermercado Camilo, Comercial Manzanillo and Colmado Luis, Supermercado Ciabo and Uridy, every small colmado store, several times, sometimes within the same day. Colleen (American friend who lives in Beron) recruited one of the boys from her barrio to comb the streets for us…he managed 6 in a whole day, and they were good, but not Presidente. Colmado Antonio has been the only regular saviour, supplying on average 3-4 boxes per begging visit. Myself, Alexander and Samantha have poked through unappetising rubbish dumps for usable specimens with no success but plenty of ant-bites and encounters with interesting smells.

Today we went on the last scavenge, the same shop to shop trawl, only visiting those who had supplied before and whose promises of “mañana” filled us with hope, but proved empty. On the way back, we went for a last ditch attempt at the club de empleados, just next the the Fundacion where we drink and play pool every night, and who have repeatedly denied our requests for boxes in the past….success! Noortje was happy.

2008-08-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

Juana, the alcalde (mayor) of El Cabo and youngest children in their new house in Barrio Lindo in Higuey

2008-08-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

El Cabo beach exists! For years (can’t actually believe it’s been years now that we have been coming to El Cabo) I have laboured under the impression that there was just rocky shoreline, needle sharp and buffeted by waves, and no beaches near El Cabo – hence no landing places for canoes or easy access for fishermen other than several kilometres to the north by Juanillo bay, or many kilometres to the south by Boca de Yuma – all too far or too “private access forbidden” for the locals to use. I heard stories about the thriving relationship between Juanillo fishermen and the villagers of El Cabo which existed in the past, and how Juanillo bay was one of the most beautiful natural sandy bays around and THE place to bathe and be seen. This also posed an archaeological problem – why would people live in El Cabo, next to the sea, and not be able to gain access to it (of course, they could have constructed all kinds of jetty-like things which we have not excavated – perhaps there’s a Deal pier underwater somewhere…)? I imagined daily canoe traffic to and fro from El Cabo to Boca de Yuma, Puerto Rico, Isla Mona and Macao as it’s by far the easiest way to traverse large distances, and fishing boats bobbing in the waves by and beyond the reef visible from the roundhouses on the Cabo bluff, but I was puzzled about how on earth they would have managed to drag canoes over corals and rocks as sharp as dog’s teeth (thanks De Las Casas, good description). So when I saw some photos at Belto’s house of people frolicking on a sandy beach, I assumed it was Juanillo, before “development”. Belto however told me it was on a beach where everyone in El Cabo ALWAYS went, just up the road. Seeing that in the past I have had all sorts of conversations with locals and Dominican archaeologists about the access to the sea issue, I assumed “up the road” was a typical Dominican understatement of distance. But no, he assured me it was just in front of Nicolas’house – where else did he get all those burgao (West Indian topshell) from? So we wrapped up feature excavation a few minutes early, and went to do some experimental archaeology (i.e. a pleasant swim). It was gorgeous – two small strips of sand, about 3-4 metres along the beach, leading into deep water, crystal clean (Belto assured me sharks preferred the other side of El Cabo, so we were safe…). I thought that perhaps sandy stretches like this appeared and disappeared regularly with storms and the like, but Belto also said that he swam in the same place 20 years ago, when he was 10. It’s also a favourite landing spot for narcos. But yesterday it was just beautiful and the waves were perfect, and we sat on a log to dry off at the end, and it completely slipped my mind to look for potsherds…

2008-07-24T06:20:00.001-07:00

We got to the site yesterday, ready to do a bit of posthole digging, to encounter the whirring blades of a military chopper, and a group of national narcotics police – dressed to the nines in flak jackets, automatic weapons and helmets. Thinking we had surprised them in the middle of a drugs heist, we stayed in the truck and intended to make our way to Belto’s house for refuge until the nasty men had gone. They hollered at us to stop however, and not being fans of Dominican uniformed, weaponed men, we stopped.

“Can we borrow your flippers?”

“Can we borrow your flippers?” ?? We checked the translation with Erlend (fluent Spanish speaker in the team), but yes, the narco police had indeed just asked us whether it would be possible, please, to borrow some flippers and a snorkel. We stared at them incredulously - had they forgotten to pack them in the heli when they left Santo Domingo that morning? I mean, sometimes we forget things too – the finds list, a spare trowel…

We ate some melon at Belto’s, and as soon as the heli departed, went back to the site. After a bit of a fly and a swim however, they came back and lounged against the fence (see pic, check out heli in background) and asked for telephone numbers and offered a hand with the digging. We spurned their offers and eventually they got bored and left. Meanwhile Kelin and Manolo turned up with that morning’s catch – far more impressive behaviour.

2008-07-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

2008-07-19T09:53:00.001-07:00

Pido Auxilio!!

Copy and paste this link for a feel of the bachata performance we went to last night

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=uGHLS_E4kzk

The short chap in the white suit is the famous Dominican bachatero, Joe Veras. The beer-drinking dutchies are trying to work up the courage to hit the dance floor….

The Irish and the American beat them to it!

A dominican bar in Beron is quite an experience. The cost of a live concert is too much for the average Beron citizen to afford, and so many of them hang around on motorbikes or on the fence outside, whereas inside its full of Dominican players, young Dominican women, rich white men, and us…a perfect people-watching experience, all to the backdrop of deafening music and a pervasive sweat which gets worse with every dance [read: inept shuffle]. The routine dancefloor conversation with Dominican men goes something like this:

Juan: “Tienes novio?”[have you got a boyfriend?]

Unsuspecting archaeologist: “Que? Hablo poco espanol.” [sorry, I don’t speak much Spanish].

Juan: “You have boyfriend?”

Playing it safe archaeologist: “Si, tengo esposo..y ninos tambien” [Yes, i have a husband, and children].

Juan: “Estan aqui?” [are they here now?]

Naïve archaeologist: “no”.

Juan, triumphant: “Entonces, no tienes novio! Yo soy tu novio dominicano.” [Ah ha! So you have no boyfriend in the Dominican Republic. I’ll be your boyfriend!]

Nonplussed archaeologist returns to seat unable to puzzle over this Dominican logic.

2008-07-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

El Cabo is still there! The site, and the village. More importantly the village – it’s good to see old friends again. Nicolas, still bonkers – he cut all his fingers off in a mortorbike accident (but still climbs trees with his machete to hack at coconuts), and Belto and Margot are still running the only shop (colmado) in the entire area – we delivered them a load of ice, soap, salt fish, beer, rum and tobacco in our truck to replenish the stores and since then Belto has been lying in his hammock complaining of kidney problems…..the pile of empty rum bottles by the chicken shed may point to the origin.

The village has given the school a new lick of paint – it’s transformed from blue to green (do we have to change the colour key on all the maps we made?). It looks fantastic…apart from the fact the door is off its hinges and there is no teacher, and no children to attend, even if there were a teacher. El Cabo is on it’s last legs. The school is empty and the bright pink paint has faded on the church, doors of once inhabited houses are bolted and used as weekend fishing lodges, the mayor and his family have moved to Higuey. Inevitable given its position between private land and the rest of the country.

Other than that we’ve been counting shells and weighing pottery in a processing frenzy. Vital to this work is music, and patience with each other’s tastes. Fortunately for me (not for anyone else), I am able to impose my tunes on the whole group by dint of the fact that I have a laptop and speakers….perhaps that’s why everyone migrated to the other lab this afternoon.

We visited Higuey on our day off excursion. I had forgotten about the shoe-shine mobs which follow you from street to street – small boys carrying wooden boxes with bottles of shoe polish (black paint and spit I think), insisting on cleaning your shoes even if you have bare feet in flip flops. Local bars employ men with sticks to chase them away from clients, and the tourist police at the cathedral set dogs on them.

It’s fantastic to be here again.

2007-12-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

It wouldn't be doing justice to my fieldwork experience not to show pictures of the other, very non-Caribbean locations my PhD has taken me to. Hence the above from a trip to Lujbljana at the start of December - christmas lights, sausages and cabbages and the cold. Oh, and we also talked about geophysics a bit...

2007-08-27T15:34:00.001-07:00

“Se ba Ales

Se ba Meno

Y se ba Corina

Y todos mis amigos

Y Manolo se queda muy triste

Porque se keda sin patrones y sin amigos

Yo no boy a encontrar

Que hacer

Kisiera irme tambien a Olanda” (Manolo on the blackboard of the school)

It is hard to say goodbye. Today I said goodbye to the site and the villagers and the village. I pulled out the metal pins and filled in the excavated holes and tried to take a hard look at the site to fix its impressions on my mind to summon up at later stages of inspirationless-office-drudge. I want to remember the relentless sound of the sea, the blues and greens all around, the palmchats chatter (if this is what makes that cheery chirrup), the pelicans flying by, the vultures sometimes hovering, the lizards on the paths, the feeling of what it’s like to be in the flat bitten out segment of the cliffs between two headlands to north and south, the feeling of sitting on a rock and knowing you are not even the 1000nth person to have done this here (I always remember the comment of someone at TAG in Glasgow, not an archaeologist, who said that archaeology was a way of dealing with collective loss – this is sometimes how I feel about the people in the past who we try to know, but will never know).

I went to say goodbye to Margot (Belto’s wife) and Juana (the mayor’s wife) and their families (these are the people of El Cabo we do know). This year we are not only leaving them, but they are also leaving us. If we come back next year, most of them will not be here. They will be in Beron or Higuey, seeking another life, dispersed and no longer los caberos. I saw Monolo on his donkey on the way to work, with his son propped on the back, on the way to build a house for someone now that we can no longer offer him work. I saw Kelby and Ramona on their motorbike, off to pick up the mayor from hospital in Higuey, I sat on Juana’s bed and hugged her and all her children, and then off to do the rounds at Margot’s house, and hugged her in her hammock and Kelin, and walked out of the village and drove fast away.

One joke of which the locals never, ever tired of in the field was making a comparison between someone and the face on a ceramic adorno. It didn’t matter what the adorno looked like (bat, frog, monkey), or how many we found in a day (could be up to 20 or 30), they would still rush up to someone, student, local, whoever, and hold it up against their face and break down with laughter. Somehow it was pretty funny each time.

2007-08-26T13:51:00.001-07:00

“Till then they had been crowing and flapping their wings threateningly. But now, craning forward and moving their heads up and down, or gyrating them with their beaks still touching, they fell silent: stream-lined instruments of destruction on stilts, glaring at each other through wary, bloodshot and ferocious eyes. Their remaining neck feathers stiffened into ruffs, and then, slowly turning inside out as their anger rose, surrounded the purposeful heads in bristling funnels of plumage.” (Patrick Leigh Fermor 1950)

Cock fights are probably illegal in Europe (are they?). This strikes me as enormous hypocrisy given the institutionalised inhumanity of industrialised farming practices compared to the various pastimes which involve moments of cruelty in otherwise relatively free and unfettered lives of Dominican animals. I say ban battery farms and let a few cocks fight. But let’s leave this debate for another time as it was far from my mind when visiting the cock-pit, or club gallistico in Haitian dominated Fiusi, just down the road from Bavaro. It was one of the most entertaining experiences of my time in the DR this year. Sorry grandma, but it’s true, and for your sake I will spare you the details, although the details are fascinating.

Anyway, one Monday, Manolo, Manolo’s mother Ana, Belto and his son and daughter Yahaira and Kelin persuaded Menno to leave work early to go to the club (pronounced “clu”) with Juan and his cockerel. Juan is one of the El Cabo seguridad, who sits in a hut all day outside the village, always with a red cockerel under his arm. So off we went, the 7 of us, in a state of high excitement to the clu! The clu was a round auditorium with ranked plastic seats, a sandpit in the middle and chicken wire round the outside and a thatched roof. We arrived at 2.30, which Juan said was late. This surprised me as I have never heard a Dominican refer to lateness before. Nevertheless we sat for a good hour or two in the colmado bar opposite and drank beer and then wandered over to the ring. So I am not sure what we were late for.

Peripheral to the cock pit were all kinds of gambling tables – dice games on painted boards, and small huts with more dice games going on inside. Manolo and Kelin disappeared into the fray. Miraculously enough however, the ambiance was very relaxed and I joined in a few rounds of doubles (and won DR$20 – about 50 eurocents –it would have been bad form for a foreigner to clear the table). This was the first occasion to throw away your money.

The second opportunity came after the cock weighing. This seemed like a tense business – you have to make sure your cock is pitted against another of similar weight. It doesn’t matter how fat your cock is, as long as it is fighting against equal fatness. This was also where the betting was done and to be honest I have no idea how it all worked. We just handed cash over to Manolo, a frugal amount compared to the weeks and weeks worth of wages Manolo, Belto and Kelin were forking out. Ana petitioned Menno for cash – “a loan” – a loan with no chance of repayment. Naturally out of loyalty we put all money on the Cabo cock.

At about 6 we entered the cockpit (and we were late arriving at 2.30!?), women allowed in for free – obviously the opposite rule applies than on ships. We got seats halfway up. Many others were craning their heads to look through the chicken wire from outside. I wondered whether it was going to be a bloody affair and whether I would be disgusted like Patrick Leigh Fermor who needed a stiff whisky and soda after his Haitian experience in 1950. Again the cocks were weighed in scales in the centre of the ring by two handlers. The judge then sprayed each cock with a substance that Belto said neutralised any poison saboteurs may have put on the birds to gain an advantage. He then produced a very angry cock from a bag he kept under his chair, and waved it threateningly in the beaks of the combatants to get them riled. I asked whether the cocks had names so that their supporters could call them. Juan looked at me like I was an idiot (I would have thought that walking around for months with a cockerel under your arm, stroking and massaging its fighting legs and tending to it 24 hours a day would at least merit giving it a name!). Apparently the are just called “rojo” (red) and “blanco” (white), depending on what leg band they are assigned in the ring (which was actually blue –another of those things which escaped me that day). When the fighting started, and I think we witnessed about 7 bouts from different couples, most of them followed the same pattern – the cocks, who are clearly very bellicose beasts by nature, fluffed up their neck feathers and executed strange leaps at each other’s heads and tried to peck each others eyes and necks. Mostly the fight ended when one just got tired and gave up. Tiredness, not lethal blows seems to stop the fighting. Yes, there was a bit of blood, but you could only really see this on the white cocks, and not on the red ones. When the cocks were released to fight, the third lot of betting took place – this was more ad hoc betting with spectators sitting around you. More than once I saw Belto yelling “blanco” and fix someone else yelling “rojo” and arranging a private bet.

The Cabo cock lost. This was obvious from the moment it strutted into the ring. It was not an entirely disgraceful fight, but blanco was just better. I was worried about this from the start. I thought about how upset people get when their football team loses, how the lost millions distress people and dampen the whole experience, how little the locals earn and how much they bet. I thought it could only end badly and I wished stupid rojo had won. No one seemed to care however, not Juan, not Manolo, not Kelin nor Ana, Belto, nor Yahaira. They just disappeared into the dice games again and bought more rounds of beer. When I asked them how they felt they jovially said that some you win and some you lose and then next time their cock would do better. In fact Manolo and Belto said rojo was going to lose before they even placed money on it – and still they placed money on it – not I think because cock-fighting is a very unpredictable sport – but just because they like betting – this was obvious from the fact that they really did spend all their wages on all sorts of games that afternoon, and lost it all, and seemed not in the slightest bothered about it.

The defeated cocks were sold cheaply outside to people for soup (more out of disgust of their owners than necessity I suspect), the winners taken home to train up for another day. Poor old rojo. Then we all climbed back in the truck and went to Beron for some more beers and dancing!

2007-08-26T13:49:00.001-07:00

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?!).

2007-08-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

I'd be the first to admit that some things archaeologists are interested in are not very tangible or relevant or juicy to the majority of people. I, for example, am interested predominantly in postholes - negative features, filled with only earth, sand and gravel; others get passionate about a nice soil stratigraphy - ultimately very tedious. However, some things archaeologists find are of immediate interest to a wider audience - and we are currently making such discoveries in El Cabo.
The indigenous population of the eastern Dominican Republic were slain and enslaved and perished from disease within about 50 years of European contact. Though many agricultural practices, recipes and elements of their language persist, and some of their genes are mingled with those of the current Dominican population, culturally and socially and physically they were pretty much destroyed by the Spanish.
Until this week, we believed that the site of El Cabo was abandoned before Columbus set foot in the Americas. However, one small blue glass bead and a handful of green glazed ceramics throws a whole new light on the Taino settlement of El Cabo. These few artefacts, recovered by students from the sieves, indicate that the indigenous population was still very much at large when the Spaniards came with their guns, germs and steel. They also indicate that the Taino in El Cabo exchanged goods, probably gold, pearls and other goodies coveted by the Europeans, for pottery, glass, bells, pins and copper buckles and other goodies which they themselves coveted. We are still assessing the implications of these new finds, but what we may be witnessing in the iste are some of the first encounters between Europeans and inhabitants of the Americas!

2007-08-03T13:02:00.001-07:00

There is nothing finer than driving a big truck along Dominican roads, through resort terrain, with a good salsa blasting from the radio, the sun shining and the windows open! All my painful months of driving lessons on miserable Dutch, every-movement-controlled-roads, have paid off (well, actually i will probbaly never be able to pay it off) because of this.
And to top it all, yesterday I received a consignment of licorice (drop) and a BBQ set from the Netherlands - Laura - THANK YOU! I now understand a blog can be more than just virtual rambling if as a result you get a stainless steel spatula, fork, and tongs for the next Cabo inferno! Thank you so much!
Well, I know it has been a while since I last updated this, and a new group of students has arrived, so it might be a while more, but I will have lots to tell when i manage to write it all down - about jamaica, skeletons and other things...

2007-07-22T04:37:00.000-07:00

On fieldwork, the most tiring part of the week is actually the day off (once every 10 days). This involves trying to sleep through the horrendous noise of construction and seguridad walkie-talkies in the early morning, packing your bikini and stumbling into the truck headed for the beach with a cuba libre hangover from the night before. Once on the beach, the warm wind and the hot sun do not mitigate the symptoms - this is only achieved by a paddle and a fruit punch and a gentle game of beach petanque. After this you have to decide what on earth to do with the rest of the hours in the day, which may seem like an easy task after 10 days non-stop work, but after the regimented existence of fieldwork, in which every waking second is filled with a task - documenting, list-making, digging, driving, loading, unloading, labeling, sorting - all capacity for self determination is sapped. I think this is mainly my problem, as most of the others manage to successfully chill in a hammock and read a book.

The BBQ the other week was another Cabo style, sweaty, dancy, flamed chicken filled fiesta. This time, for the first time, we came fully armed with BBQ griddle and tongs (not to mention the case full of ice and beer which we never forget). The tongs, thoughtfully purchased from the Blokker in the Netherlands by Menno, and transported across the Atlantic to prevent us burning our flesh, snapped within seconds - fine for a dalliance with a few sausages on a gas BBQ in a Dutch backyard, but evidently not up to the job of a tropical 30 man feast. It was back to sticks and penknives again, only this time we had a Cabo fire stoker to hand - an old man who expertly raked the embers and fished fallen drumsticks from the flames.
The party was excellent - we bachata'ed till gone midnight. Only those of us who know El cabo form previous years noticed that there were far fewer people in the village, and a more staid atmosphere. It gets quieter every time we come, as people move away from an area which is soon to be transformed into another toursit zone.

The trucks have just left for the field, leaving me behind. I am going to Jamaica for 3 days to a conference. I feel like I have abandoned them all. I know the speed at which we are working will mean the site will be transformed when I return - more squares open, more spoil heaps undulating across the terrain, more finds bags and occurences... until the next time...

2007-07-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

grubby and happy. the 1st group team photo.

2007-07-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

The first thing I learnt on going into El Cabo the first day was that the village had been prey to malaria. This distressing news I dutifully conveyed back to my supervisers and we made plans to break the news to the students, lather ourselves in deet, cancel the village BBQ planned for the end of the week and go to the local hospital for up to the minute news on malaria precautions for the region. The next day Corinne closely questioned Manolo, our informant on the matter, who again dolefully confirmed that indeed, several villagers had a bad case of malaria. He then proceeded to describe the symptoms: lack of money, boredom, in short, a general feeling of malaria…not mosquito born then? Corinne enquired, not at all, he said, and besides, the symptoms had been relieved by our arrival…clearly in El Cabo Spanish, malaria means a general feeling of malaise. We were relieved, and prescribed a dose of collaborative excavation, flirting between villagers and Dutch students, village parties and more miscommunications! I resolved to improve my Spanish and not misinterpret the one word I think I understand in a sentence.

Apart from this initial excitement, the 2 days we have had onsite have proved very productive. The mixture of old team and new students makes for quick work. We are excavating squares on the coast, refreshed by a good breeze, and with some nice finds (beads and shell adornments). As usual, I am behind the drawing table, doling out finds labels and bags and watching other people hurt their knees and backs and get covered in fine goat pooh and sand powder from the sieves. Today we had a friendly drunk visiting the site. He lolled on the fence for a while with a bottle of rum and then decided we were interesting enough to visit, climbed on the fence, toppled over the other side onto his head and stumbled over to the pit edge, where he remained, rambling on incomprehensibly at anyone troweling near enough.

More soon...especially seeing as tomorrow night we run the gauntlet of another village party!

2007-05-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

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”.

2007-05-27T13:46:00.001-07:00

“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.

2007-05-21T18:34:00.001-07:00

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).

2007-05-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

“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.

2007-05-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-08T14:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

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…

2007-05-05T02:49:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-04-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

Queensday in Leiden 2007. It is probably hotter here than in the DR...more of which over the next month as we prepare for 3 weeks of geophysical survey on El Cabo...

2006-08-17T02:47:00.000-07:00

This is the last installment of the field season. I am relaxing in the bosom of my family (and Mother's dogs mattie and erik) having enjoyed a very long soak in a hot bath, and hit the tea (english) and marmite toast.

The last few days involved finishing off all the work in the field, including backfilling all the trenches we had painstakingly excavated the last 6 weeks. I always feel sad when this happens - we reveal, measure, draw, select, trample and then close it all up again, irrevocably altered. And although the archaeology of El Cabo is probably more durable than soil marks in other archaeological situations, and although hotels and golf courses will encroach upon this spot in the too near future anyway, and although we will contribute to discussions and pictures of what life was like in the Greater Antilles a thousand years ago, it is still nevertheless sad to bury it all again.

There was no time for such sentimental musing in Punta Cana however, as all free time was cancelled so that we could finish finds processing before departure. Finds processing basically meant picking tiny shells, from tinier pieces of coral, from gravel and goat shit - not the most glamourous or scintillating of tasks.....

a typical 'feature fill' in need of processing by some poor BA2 student...

But eventually we were ready to leave for Holland with our data. And so it is just left for me to say THANK YOU Menno, Corinne, Angus, Hayley, Adriana, Ilona, Ingeborg, Pauline, Benjamin, Annemarie, Kate, Noortje, Alexander, Peter, Roberto, Nicole, Jason, Jose, Kelvin, Alessandra, Ramona, Belto and Manolo, Yann and Marc for a wonderful excavation season and for making El Cabo the most exciting site I have ever worked on and for being such a dedicated team of arcaheologists.

ps, a tip for those of you still in the DR - watch out when you go through customs - first they tip away your rum, deet and suncream (no liquids in hand luggage) and then they capitalise on your dismay by rifling through your wallet - yes, the airport officials and the army are responsible for this goodbye gesture. Be warned!

2006-08-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

We are beginning to see patterns in the features and make the first tentative interpretations about the types of buildings which would have been inhabited in precolumbian times. Here is a working plan of the features in a 10 x 20m excavation trench. The circular shapes represent holes dug for wooden posts. Everyone on the dig has been joining up the dots and presenting their own ideas about the Amerindian ideal home. Today we placed wooden sticks in the postholes to better visualise the patterns, and for the rest of the week (if the rain holds off), we will excavate the postholes to test these ideas and make comparisons of the various features.

Precolumbian settlement features

2006-08-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

It’s got to that stage in the season where lunchtimes are no longer for beach volleyball among the palm trees, but naps on the couch…poor Angus and Hayley!

Roberto has left us to go back to Cuba, but José has arrived to take his place with the snoring boys. Since the Americans (Nicole and Jason) arrived last week I have noticed that our beer consumption has increased (well done guys), and it’s only thanks to the abstemious BA2s that we don’t have to get in industrial supplies.

As for the site, we received a further stamp of legitimacy today when the director of the Museo del Hombre and a small entourage (2) of archaeologists came to visit from Macao. This gave me another chance to talk to Harold Olsen, someone who has done a lot of archaeological survey work in this area and knows much about the archaeological landscape.

From the artefact densities in our test units we are coming to the conclusion that the main occupation may not be represented by the Boca Chica component, but is earlier (i.e. Ostiones and the elusive fase transicional). We may also have uncovered parts of intact living floor in certain areas of the site (i.e. the floor of the house on top of the foundations), as well as a possible hearth feature (with pottery and fire cracked rocks and charcoal – possibly the remains of someone’s dinner!).

2006-07-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

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...

2006-07-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-07-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-07-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

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….

2006-07-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-07-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

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.