Archeologists Try to Save Jamaica’s Past

Fragments of 1,400-year-old red clay pottery glisten from mounds of dirt dumped beside the gravelly beginnings of a road running through the Jamaican bush over what was once a Taino Indian village.

Archeologist Dorrick Gray plucks one fragment from the dark soil, doing his best to ignore the rumble of heavy trucks and earthmovers.

“If we weren’t doing this, sites such as this would be lost forever,” says Gray, who as chief archeologist for Jamaica’s National Heritage Trust leads a struggle to protect the traces of past civilizations.

Since 1996, Gray’s six-person team of archeologists has been surveying land and cataloging historical sites around Jamaica in advance of road construction and other projects.

Their list of sites has grown sixfold to some 3,000, of which about one in seven are former villages of the Taino--a native American people who predated the Spanish and English colonizers and the African slaves whose descendants dominate Jamaica today.

The team is too busy to do much excavation; the most they generally can hope for, after some rudimentary digging, is to prevent the wholesale destruction of a site and note its existence.

With the village near Inverness, Gray and the contractor compromised: The road couldn’t be moved, so instead it was elevated onto a 7-foot-high gravel foundation.

“They get the road but are not digging up the ground under it, so the site will remain intact,” Gray said.

A small step forward in a land where development has tended to trump conservation--a situation that has more than anything hampered study into the origins of the Taino.

“Jamaica is virtually a black hole in terms of archeology and cultural preservation and what we know about the Taino,” said William Keegan, an archeologist at the University of Florida. “The government seems to be insensitive to the importance of cultural heritage.”

In addition to the damage wrought by construction, “there has also been a tremendous loss along the beaches and coves where [Taino] villages were located. . . . Foreigners come down and build vacation houses, and then everything is lost.”

Most excavations in Jamaica, and they are relatively few, are carried out by American universities.

Government officials more concerned with Jamaica’s high murder rate and providing essential services like education and health say they are striving for a balance--but most refuse to address on the record an issue perceived as sensitive.

“This is a country that is slowly beginning to understand the need for archeological exploration,” said former Trust director Ainsley Henriques. “Perhaps [Jamaica] is not doing it fast enough. How much has been lost in the mining of bauxite--we don’t have a clue.”

Little is known about the estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Taino who lived in Jamaica, which they called Yamaye. Within two centuries of Columbus’ arrival the Taino who inhabited the Caribbean had been slaughtered or enslaved. Their traces all but disappeared. Hints of their culture remain--such as in the English word “barbecue,” which they used to describe the rock slabs on which they cooked bread.

Gray said he thought the 10-acre Inverness site, discovered in December, may reveal something about “the interaction between the Taino and Spanish,” who dominated the island from Columbus’ arrival in 1494 to the British takeover in 1655.

Dirt floors of Taino dwellings and a few chunks of Taino pottery and Spanish ceramics have been found at the site. Holding the Taino pottery in his palm, Gray compared it with a piece from the more refined blue-and-white 17th century Spanish “Delft ceramics” found in the same pile of dirt.

“We have to balance the country’s need for economic development and cultural preservation,” Gray said. “The hope is that we can preserve a site like this until someone with the necessary resources decides to do the work.”