Puerto Rico Archaeological Find Mired In Politics

U.S. archaeologist Nathan Mountjoy sits next to stones etched with ancient petroglyphs and graves that reveal unusual burial methods in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The archaeological find, one of the best-preserved pre-Columbian sites found in the Caribbean, form a large plaza measuring some 130 feet by 160 feet that could have been used for ball games or ceremonial rites, officials said.

SAN JUAN -- The lady carved on the ancient rock is squatting, with frog-like legs sticking out to each side. Her decapitated head is dangling to the right.

That's how she had been, perfectly preserved, for up to 800 years, until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came upon her last year while building a $375 million dam to control flooding in southern Puerto Rico.

She was buried again last week with the hope that some day specialists will study her and Puerto Rican children will visit and learn about the lives of the Taino Indians who created her. But archaeologists and government officals first had to settle a raging debate about who should have control over her and other artifacts sent to Georgia for analysis.

The ancient petroglyph of the woman was found on a five-acre site in Jácana, a spot along the Portugues River in the city of Ponce, on Puerto Rico's southern coast. Among the largest and most significant ever unearthed in the Caribbean, archaeologists said, the site includes plazas used for ceremony or sport, a burial ground, residences and a midden mound -- a pile of ritual trash.

The finding sheds new light on the lifestyle and activities of a people extinct for nearly 500 years.

Experts say the site -- parts of it unearthed from six feet of soil -- had been used at least twice, the first time by pre-Taino peoples as far back as 600 AD, then again by the Tainos sometime between 1200 and 1500 AD.

''It was thrilling, a once-in-a-lifetime thing,'' said David McCullough, an Army Corps archaeologist. ``Just amazing.''

But like all things on this politically charged island, the discovery got caught up in a sovereignty debate: If an archaeological site rich in historic and cultural value is discovered in a federal construction site in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, who should be in charge of it?

After months of finger-pointing and accusations of officially sanctioned plundering, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers poured $2 million into preserving the site. Plans to put a rock dump over it were changed, and the unearthed discovery was reburied with the aspiration that archaeologists will eventually return to dedicate the 10 or 20 years needed to thoroughly study the finding.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers promises the collection sent to Georgia will be returned to Puerto Rico. Some 75 boxes of skeletons, ceramics, small petroglyphs and rocks were sent via Federal Express in two double-boxed shipments for analysis.

''The site is a significant contribution to our understanding of what Indians were doing,'' McCullough said. ``The thing that makes it unique is that the petroglyphs are so finely done. We originally were supposed to be there six weeks. It wound up taking four months.''

McCullough said the corps had an inkling that the site was there since the mid 1980s but had never done much testing. They started digging in earnest last year while building a dam and lake to protect the region from floods, and realized the site had significant value.

The corps found a ball court with four walls lined by tall stones, where they believe the Tainos either danced or played games. Three were covered in petroglyphs, among the best experts had ever seen. Some of the figures were carved upside down, which none of the archaeologists had ever seen before. Discoveries included a jade-colored amulet and the remains of a guinea pig, likely the feast of a tribal chief.

''The size of the ball court is bigger than just about anything else in the Caribbean,'' McCullough said.

But in its quest to build the dam and use the location as a dumping ground for rocks, critics say the corps quickly hired a private archaeological firm to mitigate -- a hurried process of saving what can be conserved so a project can go forward. The company sent 125 cubic feet of artifacts in two shipments to its facility in Georgia for analysis, a move allegedly made without consulting Puerto Rican authorities, which locals felt violated the law.

But the question became: Whose law applied? U.S. law says such artifacts found by the corps must be warehoused in a federally approved curating facility. No such place exists in Puerto Rico. And Puerto Rican law says historical artifacts belong to the people of Puerto Rico.

''In Puerto Rico, everything that has to do with our past is sentimental, and Puerto Ricans take it to heart,'' said Marisol Rodríguez, an archaeologist at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. ``There's a feeling that you're taking something that's mine. It's about our national identity, regardless of the island's political status.''

Rodríguez is pleased that the site has been preserved but acknowledges she was furious at how it was originally excavated with heavy machinery.

''I was so angry. I was indignant,'' she said. ``I could not believe that a place of such importance was being treated with such disrespect.''

New South Associates, the firm hired to do the digging, says it excavated about 5 percent of the site for study.

''It was in the newspaper that we raped and pillaged the site, because it all got caught up in local politics,'' said archaeologist Chris Espenshade, New South's lead investigator on the project. ``We are required to take the artifacts to a federally approved curating facility. That played into the idea that we were stealing Puerto Rican cultural patrimony away and never bringing it back. There's no question these things should be available for Puerto Rican scholars without them having to travel to go see it.

What's left of the site will remain beside a five-year dam construction project, which will continue as planned. It may be vulnerable to floods, archaeologists acknowledged, but they note that it lasted that way underground for hundreds of years.

''It's not the best way to preserve it, but it's better than the alternative: to destroy it,'' Espenshade said. ``The Corps could have destroyed it, but they took the highly unusual step to preserve it.''

Puerto Rican authorities say they are committed to opening a facility needed to properly store and exhibit the artifacts.

The Institute of Puerto Rican Culture is scouting locations and trying to secure the approximately $570,000 a year needed to operate such a warehouse. Officials hope it will open as early as mid-2009, but some experts still worry.

''Nobody could believe that in the 21st century, a federal agency would hire a private agency to dig up a site and take things,'' said Miguel Rodríguez, an archaeologist who sat on Puerto Rico's government archaeological council for a total of eight years.

He quit in January following a heart attack, which he blamed on stress over the Jácana site.

''Those are the things that happened in the 18th and 19th century, not now,'' Rodríguez said. ``Nobody dares go to Mexico, do an excavation and just take the stuff. That's officially sanctioned looting.''

While officials debate where they will find the funds for a museum, storage facility and lab, the Department of Natural Resources has hired 24-hour security to watch over the archaeological site, just to be sure no artifacts wind up for sale on the Internet.

''With the artifacts in Georgia,'' Department of Natural Resources Secretary Javier Vélez said, ``at least they are not on eBay.''

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.

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.

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!

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