[Aztlan] SURPRISING NEW TAINO RESEARCH

[michael ruggeri]

FROM THE NY TIMES
Humble Brass Was Even Better Than Gold to a 16th-Century Tribe in Cuba


By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI
Published: January 16, 2007
Because of its otherworldly brilliance, the 16th-century Taíno  
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 guanín. 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 Taíno 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 Taíno village of El Chorro de Maíta 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 Taíno, 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 Martinón-Torres of University  
College London, the project’s lead researcher. “But instead of  
lumping the Taíno 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, Dr.  
Martinón-Torres and a Cuban archaeologist, Roberto Valcárcel 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  
Taíno 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 Taíno traded 200 pieces of gold for a  
single piece of guanín, 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 Taíno  
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 Taíno 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  
Taínos 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 Maíta. First excavated in 1998 by a Cuban-Canadian team, Los  
Buchillones is the site of the only known intact Taíno house. In the  
last decade, continuing study of the site and the surrounding region  
by Mr. Valcárcel Rojas and Mr. 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 Taíno ‘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 Maíta, the  
Taíno 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 United States  
sanctions. In 2005, the scholarly volume Dialogues in Cuban  
Archaeology assembled a dozen English-language reports in one place.  
(In it is a paper Mr. Valcárcel Rojas co-wrote about El Chorro de  
Maíta.) 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, Mr. Valcárcel Rojas was denied a visa to attend the  
annual Society for American Archaeology conference in Puerto Rico.  
Dr. Martinón-Torres and Mr. 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 cargos,  
but we haven’t found that brass in Cuba,” Dr. Martinón-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.”