16th century Cuban Indians treasured metal of Spanish
Jennifer Pinkowski, New York Times
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Because of its otherworldly brilliance, the 16th century Taino 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 guanin. 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 Taino 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 Taino village of El Chorro de Maita in northeastern Cuba,
according to a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
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 Taino, 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 Martinon-Torres of University College
London, the project's lead researcher. "But instead of lumping the Taino
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,
Martinon-Torres and a Cuban archaeologist, Roberto Valcarcel 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 Taino
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 Taino traded 200 pieces of gold for a single
piece of guanin, 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 Taino 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 Taino 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 Tainos 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 Maita. First
excavated in 1998 by a Cuban-Canadian team, Los Buchillones is the site
of the only known intact Taino house. In the last decade, continuing
study of the site and the surrounding region by Valcarcel Rojas and
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 Taino '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 Maita, the Taino 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 U.S. sanctions. In 2005, the
scholarly volume "Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology" assembled a dozen
English-language reports in one place. (In it is a paper Valcarcel Rojas
co-wrote about El Chorro de Maita.) 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, Rojas was denied a visa to attend the annual Society for
American Archaeology conference in Puerto Rico. Martinon-Torres and
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 cargoes,
but we haven't found that brass in Cuba," Martinon-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."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/MNGRTNK9BS1.DTL&feed=rss.news
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