UA digs into Cuban American Indian history

7/29/2007
The Tuscaloosa News

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — What might Cuba's native culture looked like before the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s?

It might have looked a lot like Moundville.

University of Alabama students will have a chance to find out as part of a two-year, joint U.S.-Cuban archaeological expedition.

The expedition, led by UA's anthropology department and the Central-Eastern Department of Archaeology in Cuba's science ministry, focuses on Chorro de Maita, a former native village in eastern Cuba.

The village was populated by Arawakan Indians, contemporaries of the Mississippian Indians, during the time Christopher Columbus visited Cuba in 1492.

Jim Knight, a professor of anthropology at UA, is overseeing the expedition, which came about through his work with Cuban archaeologists. He and his Cuban counterparts came up with the joint expedition, which got under way with the arrival of two UA graduate students in Cuba on July 10.

"This year, we're going to concentrate on trying to map the place and make a map of where the archaeological deposits are located," Knight said. "It's not well documented yet."

The group will first map out the parameters of potential dig sites. They are looking mainly for places that were likely occupied at the time of the Spanish conquest.

"We can use the artifacts from native houses to help us determine what the American Indian response was to Spanish contact," Knight said. "Did they adopt Spanish food ways once they were introduced to Old World animals? Did they adopt European goods like brass, copper, iron?"

Among the questions archaeologists will try to answer is just what type of people the Arawak were. The dig will focus on finding clues to their domestic life.

The Arawakan and Mississippian Indians who lived near Moundville maintained similar hierarchies. Both were also agricultural societies.

The natives of El Chorro, however, fell prey to the Spanish conquest of the New World, beginning around 1512.

"Within decades, there were no Cuban Indians left," Knight said. "The site we're working on dates back to that time, so we want to find out what factors were in play as the Indians tried to cope with the Spanish." [Please note: The Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink roundly rejects this mythical rendition of Cuban history]

Knight said Chorro de Maita now is the site of a museum that is a Cuban tourist destination, not unlike Moundville.

"They completely excavated the cemeteries in the 1970s and 1980s," he said. "It's a well-known place. They've even built a replica of a native village.

"But in all of that, there's still a lot left to do, so we're trying to find the domestic areas where people lived."

The expedition is part of an initiative at UA to engage in more educational exchanges between academic institutions in Cuba and the university.

UA has, since 2002, received academic travel licenses for graduate students and faculty to go to Cuba to conduct research.

"Obviously, our focus has been to provide educational opportunities for our graduate students to a country that, in their lifetimes, has been closed to them," said Carmen Taylor, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences who is involved in the Cuba Initiative. The initiative has already facilitated trips to Cuba by faculty and grad students in library sciences and theater.

"This is an exciting opportunity for the University of Alabama, to expose students to the creative activity research of the different educational venues in Cuba," she said.

Taylor said that by next year, UA plans to expand travel opportunities to undergraduate students who wish to study in Cuba.

She noted that historically, ties between Cuba and Alabama have always existed. Havana is Mobile's sister city.

"It makes sense for the state to have ties with Cuba," she said. "People think of Cuba's relationship with Florida, but if you look at the proximity between the two, it's just as natural for us to have a relationship with them too."

The U.S. maintains few relations with its island neighbor, against which it has had a decades-long embargo.

The U.S. government's official relationship with Cuba is limited to providing humanitarian assistance. The State Department restricts travel to allow only limited visits by journalists, academics and businesspeople.

The embargo has made funding for the project a little harder to find.

The first part of the trip is being funded by a $25,000 grant from the National Geographic Society. Knight said the group is trying to secure funding for the remainder of the expedition.

"It's a little difficult, because there are a number of institutions that, because of the embargo, are not allowed to give money to do business with Cuba," he said.

Taylor said the exchanges are non-political, and the exchanges function solely within the restrictions imposed by the federal government.

"Our goal is strictly to maintain an academic exchange," she said.

Knight said he has been impressed, in the course of his previous trips to Cuba, to find how active that country's researchers are.

"We just don't know much about what they're doing," he said. "But they're using the same software, the same mapping; they have the same research interests. Despite the embargo, we've developed a great collaboration."

He said such exchanges are key to academic research.

"Archaeologists like me can't keep our heads in one area too much," he said. "You need to compare your research to other things and learn from the comparison.

"That's where we can learn the most, by broadening our horizons a bit."

Archaeology of the Cuban Taino: Turey and Survival

Gradual, perhaps grudging and incremental acceptance of the fact that the classic European tale of Taino tragedy (total extinction) is not something that can be supported with evidence.

Humble Brass Was Even Better Than Gold to a 16th-Century Tribe in Cuba

January 16, 2007, Tuesday
By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI (NYT); Science Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section F, Page 3, Column 1, 1245 words

Because of its otherworldly brilliance, the 16th-century Taíno Indians of Cuba called it turey, their word for the most luminous part of the sky.

They adored its sweet smell, its reddish hue, its exotic origins and its dazzling iridescence, qualities that elevated it to the category of sacred materials known as guanín. Local chieftains wore it in pendants and medallions to show their wealth, influence and connection to the supernatural realm. Elite women and children were buried with it.

What was this treasured stuff? Humble brass — specifically, the lace tags and fasteners from Spanish explorers’ shoes and clothes, for which the Taíno eagerly traded their local gold.

A team of archaeologists from University College London and the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment came to these conclusions by analyzing small brass tubes found in two dozen burial sites in the Taíno village of El Chorro de Maíta in northeastern Cuba, according to a recent paper in The Journal of Archaeological Science.

Huts have been reconstructed near the site as a heritage center. (photo credit: Institute of Archaeology, University College London)

The graves mostly date to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, when waves of gold-hungry conquistadors landed on Caribbean shores. Within decades, the Taíno, like their neighbors the Carib and the Arawak, were largely wiped out by genocide, slavery and disease.

But the archaeologists say this is not the whole picture. Their research — the first systematic study of metals from a Cuban archaeological site — focuses on one of the few indigenous settlements ever found that date from the period after the arrival of Europeans. The scientists say the finds add important detail and nuance to a history of the Caribbean long dominated by the first-person reportage of the Europeans themselves.

“It’s certainly true that the arrival of the Europeans was in the short term devastating,” said Marcos Martinón-Torres of University College London, the project’s lead researcher. “But instead of lumping the Taíno in all together as ‘the Indians of Cuba who were eliminated by the Spaniards,’ we’re trying to show they were people who made choices. They had their own lives. They decided to incorporate European goods into their value system.”

Brass first came to the Americas with Europeans. While a few brass artifacts have been found elsewhere in the Caribbean, no one knows when and how they were acquired. In contrast, El Chorro, first excavated in the mid-1980s, is one of the best-preserved sites in Cuba, and its artifacts have a clear archaeological context.

Training X-rays and microscopes on a half-dozen pendants, Dr. Martinón-Torres and a Cuban archaeologist, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, determined the metals’ bulk chemical composition. It was a mixture of zinc and copper — the elements of brass.

They then used a scanning electron microscope to find the pendants’ unique geochemical signature. All came from Nuremberg, Germany, a center of brass production since the Middle Ages.

The few other metal artifacts from the cemetery — pendants made from a gold-copper-silver alloy — probably came from Colombia, where the Taíno are thought to have originated. Only two tiny gold nuggets, of local origin, were found.

Sixteenth-century portraits in places like the Tate Gallery held further clues. Many subjects wear bootlaces and bodices fastened with objects strikingly like those found in the graves. Similar objects have been excavated from early colonial settlements, including Havana and Jamestown, Va.

European accounts said the Taíno traded 200 pieces of gold for a single piece of guanín, of which brass was the highest form. Yet the residents of El Chorro may not have considered the trade unfair, said Jago Cooper, a field director for the project. In fact, access to European brass may have increased the power of local chieftains, hastening the transition from an egalitarian society to a hierarchical one.

The finds from El Chorro suggest that interaction between the Taíno and the Europeans may have been more varied than once thought.

“Large European materials being incorporated into their culture, and exotic materials being used to reflect Taíno beliefs — it’s new, important evidence for what was happening during contact,” said William F. Keegan, an archaeologist at the University of Florida and the co-editor of The Journal of Caribbean Archaeology, who was not involved in the research. “There’s been a tendency to assume the Taínos quickly disappeared due to European diseases and harsh treatment by the Spanish, but there’s increasing evidence that the culture continued to be vibrant until the middle of the 16th century.”

Some of that evidence comes from another site in Cuba: Los Buchillones, a coastal settlement about 200 miles west of El Chorro de Maíta. First excavated in 1998 by a Cuban-Canadian team, Los Buchillones is the site of the only known intact Taíno house. In the last decade, continuing study of the site and the surrounding region by Mr. Valcárcel Rojas and Mr. Cooper has revealed a community with trade networks all over the Greater Antilles that survived into the Spanish colonial period in the early 17th century.

Clearly, they would have known about Europeans’ presence, but chose to avoid contact, unlike El Chorro’s chieftains. It may have kept them alive longer.

Together, the sites hint at an array of tactics not documented by the Europeans. “Most accounts seem to be based on the idea that Europeans ‘acted’and Taíno ‘reacted,’ ” said Elizabeth Graham of University College London, who with her husband, David Pendergast, first excavated Los Buchillones. “In the case of El Chorro de Maíta, the Taíno were clearly being proactive.”

The finds at El Chorro also help to fill a hole in the study of the Caribbean past created by Cuba’s political isolation. Archaeology of the island has been little known outside of its borders since the 1959 revolution. Very few foreign archaeologists have dug there, and the few field reports published by Cuban archaeologists, mostly trained by Soviet scholars, are difficult to get outside the country.

In recent years, there have been efforts to bring Cuban archaeology out of the long shadow cast by the 45-year-old United States sanctions. In 2005, the scholarly volume Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology assembled a dozen English-language reports in one place. (In it is a paper Mr. Valcárcel Rojas co-wrote about El Chorro de Maíta.) The relatively new Journal of Caribbean Archaeology currently has its first Cuban paper in peer review.

For most American archaeologists, papers published by their international colleagues are about as close as they are going to get to Cuba these days. Since 2004, the Bush administration has greatly tightened restrictions on educational travel to Cuba; programs under 10 weeks are now prohibited. Last summer, Florida went a step further, banning public universities from spending money on research in countries the State Department considers state sponsors of terrorism, including Cuba. Both sets of regulations are being challenged in court.

Last spring, Mr. Valcárcel Rojas was denied a visa to attend the annual Society for American Archaeology conference in Puerto Rico. Dr. Martinón-Torres and Mr. Cooper presented the research — which received Cuba’s highest academic prize — without him.

Still, the British-Cuban team is seeking a three-year grant in hopes of uncovering the trade and social networks that connected El Chorro’s inhabitants — in particular, the effects of the brass-gold trade on those connections. And there is European behavior to puzzle out, too.

“We would expect the Europeans to load up with brass in their cargos, but we haven’t found that brass in Cuba,” Dr. Martinón-Torres said. “It’s possible it hasn’t been recognized by archaeologists. We expect if both sides were happy with this exchange, there must be more evidence of it.”