Puerto Rico Archaeological Find Mired In Politics

We subscribe to Archaeology (magazine) and they featured an impressive spread on this find a few months ago. All the gory details about the legal and bureaucratic details were included.

In conjunction, that month’s issue of Archaeologis also had an article on contract archaeologists. It was a group of “rent-a-diggers”, working for the Corps, who made the discovery in Puerto Rico, and the guys were quoted as saying that it was finds like this, a once in a lifetime event, made this their dream job.

Just a thought I’ve had lately: sea level 20,000 - 12,000 bce was about 400 feet lower than it is today and large areas of the Caribe were above water at that time. More work needs to be done, both standard terrestrial digging and marine exploration. The key to the ancient peoples who spawned the Mayan and pre-Toltec/Aztec civilisations may, perhaps, be found there. (Much of North America would have been too cold and dry.)

As you can tell, I don’t hold to the idea of no one before Clovis. The aborigines made it to Australia by boat 40,000 years ago: I doubt it was a one time boating event but a long time practice for many people around the world. The most recent dna evidence for Tierra del Fuegans showed they are descendents of aborigines in Australia! It will be interesting to discover whether some of the suspected older sites in the western hemisphere were those of these aboriginal descendants.

Excellent report and pictures, thanks.

Glad to see that you're back...I understand now why you couldn't talk while you were there.

Regarding the photos... I like http://www.tinypic.com/

The code for posting the photo is provided after the upload, one merely needs to save it (perhaps in one big file with the rest of the graphics info) and keep track of which is which.

Yeah, ‘shovelbums’. Job postings are located both on yahoogroups/shovelbums and on facebook/shovelbums, although the latter I have not subscribed to. I found my first job doing this through yahoogroups. Since I got my foot in the door, I've worked for several companies via that daily posting. I have not seen the article you are referring to, but I heard it bashed the practice of living out of a hotel and laptop as you're ‘slutted’ around to different companies. It's not that bad. It's just mainly your first step in ‘paying your dues’ in the field. Some do it forever, some, like me, get picked up by a major firm eventually. I was hired as a permanent employee just in the last few weeks by another firm than the one in PR and we'll have to see if that's a good thing or not. But, everyone has to start somewhere. If someone is ONLY an archaeologist, with no other skills to offer, but a masters or PhD, sometimes they get stuck in the shovelbum life. I've worked as an archaeological tech side by side with PhDs, and we were both making $14/hr. I'm not a PhD, but I bring alot more to the table than most of the people in this field. Many kids that get into this after spending years in school don't have a clue as to how to sniff out a location for a site. That kind of thing just comes built into your DNA from birth. I also have a very broad level of experience in other things that, until now, I didn't understand why God had sent me down those weird paths in life. Now, it all makes sense. Ironically, I'm not the only one in this field that that has happened to. Now, don't get me wrong, I have seen posts on shovelbums that would have left me screwed several hundred miles from home if I had not thought it out first, but most companies just won't let that happen. The worst part of traveling for work is that I'm married with kids and almost the whole time I'm gone I'm daydreaming of playing with my wife and kids. But, on the flip-side of that, when I'm home I'm dreaming about archeology and the thrill of discovery. It's a stressful life, having two mirror images of emotion and passion all the time. Thank God my wife loves me so much. I'd have to say that probably 90% of this field is ‘rent-a-diggers’, but we all have alot of fun on the road. Some guys have their XBOX360’s and tote around 46” flat-screen TV's. Others fish all weekend, and then have a fish-fry in midweek for the entire crew(donations accepted). Some are just complainers who sit in their room and don't socialize with anyone. But, really, how can you beat the chance to be on a boat surveying shorelines and finding EVERY single artifact there is there (legally), then get shipped off to PR for 4 months, then get to record for the first time overhangs and caves with sites in them in the canyons of North Central TN, all in the space of 6 months. I love my job, I love my job, I love my job!!! lol.

As for what you said about the pre-Clovis era peopling of the Americas, I personally completely agree. Check out these three links. I really think the second is compelling evidence for something that the world cannot begin to digest as being a recurring event.
http://www.subversiveelement.com/BiminiRoad.html
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FrozenMammoths6.html
http://www.oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/
I've written many papers over the years on the coming ice age, and have occasionally been accused of being a hack that needs shock-treatment, but if you read all the way through the second ebook link you may end up on the same belief path as me. Or, you may laugh and shake your head...lol.

Many groups are currently mapping the continental shelf in search of civilizations that once existed. One is off the southern edge of Texas on the shelf extending from Galveston Bay. Some others are off the coast of Florida, off the north side of Cuba, in the English Channel, the North Sea, the Black Sea, and off the southern coast of Puerto Rico. People got around back then, and I firmly believe that that will be proven in the next few years to those that are overly conservative in their beliefs about that. Not any archaeologists that I've spoken to actually still believe that native peoples only arrived here via the land bridge during the Clovis era. There's just too much stuff that we see in the field that discounts that theory. It's like someone still believing that photos really steal your soul...lol. I've personally dug down beneath the paleo layer (in TX), beneath the caliche layer(usually another 2 feet), and found LARGE flakes that came off of tools that had to have been massive in size, but never seen the tools that they actually came off of. The tools themselves aren't there, but the materials left behind from their manufacture are. The type of flaking is COMPLETELY different from anything above them in the strata, so much so that a 5 year old kid would see the difference. But, they ARE flakes, and you would have to be a moron not to admit that. I've also seen layers of almost permanent occupation (in TX) that are sometimes as deep as 40 feet along large rivers in Central Texas. I've got one of those sites in my back pocket, just in case I eventually trust a local archaeologist to excavate it without taking advantage of the landowner, which I know. That particular site is well hidden, the evidence of it is only just beginning to show, it's buried in such a way as to be a deathtrap to any looters, and it's guarded by river-folk with no bones about using trespassers as trot-line bait for catfish.

The evidence is overwhelming for these pre-Clovis peoples and I'm happy to be one of those trying to prove it to the rest of the nay-sayers. ‘The Truth is Out There’, as they say.

"The evidence is overwhelming for these pre-Clovis peoples and I'm happy to be one of those trying to prove it to the rest of the nay-sayers. ‘The Truth is Out There’, as they say."

Care to speculate where they're from?

ping

Personally, I have my own own opinion that they have arrived in the past in the Americas from multiple different origins. I believe that most all theories are the truth, not just one. I firmly believe that the original Celtic tribes of Northern Europe aren't given enough credit for their explorations of the world, either from the Northern Atlantic regions, or from the Far East to South America. The world of historians in the Americas has a huge tendency to be ethnocentric about who got here first, as if there is some form of competition in a race to get here. I believe there is the possibility that all of them may be true at once. Who EXACTLY are the pre-Clovis? We'll know soon. FOR SURE! The directions of differing fields of science will cross each other and bring about revelations in the next few years, I can feel it. The answers aren't far off. It wouldn't surprise me if the original Celtic tribes didn't originally come from advanced civilizations existing on the continental shelves of the world and displaced by the rising oceans after the melting of the glaciers, but at the current time that sort of thinking would be considered scifi. It also wouldn't surprise me if what we end up finding out about who we think they were now and where they came from in the distant past is completely rewritten. What I mean is this, If they were originally an advanced civilization that existed within the English Channel, North Sea region, and were obliterated during the massive floods that occurred after the last ice age, they would be in turn relocated to higher ground, and nowadays we might speculate that they actually originated from that higher ground and our ideas of who they REALLY are would only be based upon our limited knowledge of what we currently know, AND, we would think that their DNA markers are original, when in fact they may just be evolved from an even EARLIER people of which we have no reference material to base conclusions about DNA lineages on. Understand what I mean? (sorry for the run-on sentence..lol.) If this turns out to be the case, or something similar, then this thought-thread opens Pandora's box, in a sense. In other words, are there other situations like this that occurred around the world that the native peoples of the continental shelf didn't survive the rising ocean levels, except in small groups? I suspect that the pre-Clovis cultures could very well be much more diverse than the Clovis, but due to the chaotic world that they lived in they had a very hard time maintaining any existence. With the undersea explorations going on nowadays in search of evidence of these ancient peoples, we should start to piece things together soon. Now, these are just thoughts that I have, and I don't expect that I'm entirely correct about them, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this ends up being the case. The pre-Clovis artifacts I have personally seen have shown me that these people are totally different than the Clovis. I mean, not even distant cousins. There's a HUGE piece of our history missing about those times and I believe the two civilizations aren't hardly related at all. Bear in mind please, these thoughts of mine are only my personal opinions, and do not reflect the mainstream beliefs of most of my peers in the field, so far. I believe most of the missing answers are laying out there somewhere on one of the continental shelves. I personally think there's a few answers in caves located on the tops of mountain ranges around the world, too. Especially in those regions that were mostly covered by glaciers during the ice ages. It just seems to make sense to me. We'll see. Both are frontiers, in a sense, in the realm of archeology. And both we know almost nothing about yet. I think that the field of archeology is still in its infancy, so to speak. Things they are a-changin’, though.

I have to agree with a lot of what you have so passionately expressed in your posts about the archelogical site and the drama that it has caused in Puerto Rico. I also agree with SatinDoll (and apparently also with you) that ultimately the people of Puerto Rico deserve to get their artifacts back. I am by no means a conservative (very very far from it) but there are times when even a liberal can see through the smokescreen. Many of us in the Taino Resurgence movement (Liberals though we may be) find ourselves totally in agreement with your opinion of the corruption and hypocricy that lies behind the facade of outrage in the official position of the current Puerto Rican governmental establishment in the face of the facts surrounding this archeological discovery and others. We feel that the local authorities have been very negligent in the care and administration of archeological sites such as Gaguana near Utuado and a number of local Taino Resurgence leaders drove that point home four years ago in the form of a take-over of and hunger strike in the Caguana site. The protesters were forcibly removed by Puerto Rican police and jailed briefly. The event has become a yearly observed historical landmark in Puerto Rico and here in the Taino dispora of the mainland which we have come to call “El Grito De Caguana”. We Tainos do want the artefacts (especially the human remains) to be returned to Puerto Rico by New South but certainly not to a hypocritical and unscrupulous adminstration in whose hads it may be in even more danger than in the hands of the archeologists who originally desecrated them.
TAINO TI!

Power to the People. That’s the way it should be. I was moved by the injustices I saw, and they weren’t by us.

P.S. - Certainly you understand that views I may express on here are my own opinions, and not necessarily the opinions of those that are farther up the food chain? Just thought I needed to state that before I was quoted for some reason.

Have a Blessed day...You are a proud people.

This thread is very interesting. I am really interested in Puerto Rico archeology. I am also a believer in the transatlantic crossings by Ethiopians, and also Nordics. I love everything you wrote on this thread, and would like to hear more from you. I am a Taino direct descendant from PR. often mistaken for a native american from the mainland. I have also heard of Ethiopian pottery in Puerto Rico’s Vieques Island. I really want to hear more from you. I am Samuel Soto on Fb samthetileman@yahoo.com also my email is sammthetileman@gmail.com remember gmail is Sam with two M’s. I am fascinated by all your posts. DavemiesterP