Day 7: The Lost Peoples of the Caribbean
This Blog will focus our Archaeological dig on a Taino site which is on the Kent estate, a working farm, that is located in the Trelawny Parish.
The Kent Taino site is an area where a group of people who were the original inhabitants of Jamaica lived, and this tribe of indigenous people dated from before Spanish discovery by Christopher Columbus and his crew. The Taino people as mentioned before are indigenous to Jamaica and the Caribbean, and since they were discovered so late and nearly wiped out so early, they are considered a prehistoric group of natives.
Our group leader is Dr. Conolley, an expert on Taino Archaeology. He discovered the site by talking to a local farmer who pointed him to the site, and the farmer told him that the Tainos used to "drink and fight" up on "Spaniard Hill" (Kent Taino site) and that story was passed down to him through generations.
So on the site we started measurement to make a grid of the site to establish a boundary of the prehistoric settlement. From there we began STPs (Shovel Test Pits) which are pits dug in the ground. The STPs are 50x50 centimeters. While pits are dug, the dirt is shoveled into a screener to be screened for artifacts that aren't normally found up on a hill such as, Pottery fragments, Chert (Flint), Bone, Shells, and Charcoal. Two years ago an STP was dug and from the pit an intact Taino bowl was discovered by a Post Oak FFS student, and we created a unit around that STP that is 1x1.5 meters in length, and width. What's different about the unit is instead of using a shovel like the STP, we are using Trowels and scraping the dirt down level by level. This method is more time consuming but is a more delicate way to find artifacts, especially in an area thought to have interesting things that we want to avoid damaging.
The Kent Taino site is an area where a group of people who were the original inhabitants of Jamaica lived, and this tribe of indigenous people dated from before Spanish discovery by Christopher Columbus and his crew. The Taino people as mentioned before are indigenous to Jamaica and the Caribbean, and since they were discovered so late and nearly wiped out so early, they are considered a prehistoric group of natives.
Our group leader is Dr. Conolley, an expert on Taino Archaeology. He discovered the site by talking to a local farmer who pointed him to the site, and the farmer told him that the Tainos used to "drink and fight" up on "Spaniard Hill" (Kent Taino site) and that story was passed down to him through generations.
So on the site we started measurement to make a grid of the site to establish a boundary of the prehistoric settlement. From there we began STPs (Shovel Test Pits) which are pits dug in the ground. The STPs are 50x50 centimeters. While pits are dug, the dirt is shoveled into a screener to be screened for artifacts that aren't normally found up on a hill such as, Pottery fragments, Chert (Flint), Bone, Shells, and Charcoal. Two years ago an STP was dug and from the pit an intact Taino bowl was discovered by a Post Oak FFS student, and we created a unit around that STP that is 1x1.5 meters in length, and width. What's different about the unit is instead of using a shovel like the STP, we are using Trowels and scraping the dirt down level by level. This method is more time consuming but is a more delicate way to find artifacts, especially in an area thought to have interesting things that we want to avoid damaging.
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