APRIL 6, 1999
ROM Mayan expert finds more remains of Taino houses
Joe Fiorito, City Columnist
National Post, Canada,
April 06, 1999
David Pendergast is glowing, he's fit, he radiates good health, and he's smiling broadly. He's just back from three happy weeks on the beach in Cuba.
Last year, you may recall that Pendergast, the world-renowned Mayan expert and vice-president of Collections and Research at the Royal Ontario Museum, uncovered a rare and ancient Taino dwelling on the edge of a beach on Cuba's north shore.
It's a significant find.
Not much is known about the Taino. They were Cuba's native people; past tense because, like many other indigenous people, they had a fatal flaw -- they were hospitable to strangers, and welcomed Columbus; sadly, the Spaniards who followed in his wake made short work of the Taino.
Until last year's discovery, there were only the scantiest written records of the kind of dwellings in which the Taino lived; no hard evidence, because thatch and wood rots quickly in the tropics.
And so Pendergast's house was the talk of the archaeological world. This year, he trumped himself. He found another house, and the probable remains of 40 more on the same stretch of beach at Los Buchillones. He also found the answers -- well, perhaps likely explanations -- to a few puzzling questions.
The houses survived, not because of some sudden calamity which knocked them down and quickly covered them with preservative muck. It seems the houses were built on stilts over the water; they simply collapsed where they stood.
The supposition is that the houses fell into ruin when the Spaniards rounded up the gentle Taino and herded them off to a fate unknown, but most likely unpleasant.
Pendergast also found a few more artifacts -- wooden bowls and plates, some of which were thrown or dropped off the verandahs. The bowls didn't bob away on the tide because they were carved from lignum vitae, which does not bob.
The intrepid Pendergast has yet to find the yucky key to ancient life: No coprolites.
A pity; archaeologists like fossilized dung, which can be used to paint a fuller picture of what people ate, and how they lived.
Coprolites aren't likely to be found because the houses were built over the water. With twinkling delicacy, Pendergast observes that, "you'd have needed the right kind of, um, deposition event; it would have to have been the right composition; it would have had to fall just so, and the sea bed would have had to cover it over right away."
He adds if they could find coprolites, they could then do "top-end dietary analysis."
Well, bottom end.
But if he has no dung, he has a clump of thatch in a plastic tub on his desk. Actually, the thatch itself looks dungish; it is black and lumpy and crusted with silt, sand and seashells. It will be carbon-dated at the U of T.
At the moment, the bulk of the Taino excavation is being sponsored by an angel, a private fellow who's paying for the work of six Canadians and 18 Cubans with his own money; there simply isn't much government loot for this sort of thing any more, and the Cubans are also quite poor.
Here's a thought: local Cuban women value the mud on the site of the dig; it's reputed to be richly therapeutic, and a tonic when smeared on the skin.
The North American women on the dig were skeptical of this, at first. But they mucked up and were converted; eventually all the women on the dig dug daubed.
One wonders whether the ROM and the Cubans might try to raise funds by canning and selling therapeutic Taino beach muck.
On the other hand, if you would prefer to forego the daubing, you can make a contribution of your own to the continuing work of the excavation by calling the Royal Ontario Museum and asking about the Cuban Archaeological Research Fund.
Joe Fiorito can be reached at jfiorito@nationalpost.com
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