The Archeological Dig at Cinnamon Bay

About one thousand years ago, there was a thriving village located in the area now occupied by the Cinnamon Bay Campground. The inhabitants of that village were Tainos, indigenous Americans whose ancestors had migrated from South America and whose culture had spread to St. John from Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.

For over 400 years the Tainos of Cinnamon Bay lived peacefully, as fishers, farmers, gatherers and hunters. Having little need for great technological advances or to defend themselves from other human beings, their culture concentrated on religious and spiritual development.

The spiritual center of their community was a special structure, called a caney, which housed statues representing the Taino gods called zemis. The caney was dedicated to ceremony and prayer and was analogous to the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples of the modern world. It was in this caney that the villagers conducted an annual ceremony in which they made offerings of the first fruits of their harvests to the zemis.

On the day of the ceremony, the cacique, or chief, flanked by the highest-ranking priests and nobles of the village, would sit at the entrance to the caney and beat on a ceremonial drum. The villagers would assemble outside of the caney and sing songs in praise of the chief's zemis. They then purged themselves by inserting a ceremonial spatula into their throats to induce vomiting. Thus cleansed, they would enter the caney carrying ceramic pottery containing offerings for the zemis. The pottery was made from sacred clay believed to contain the spirits of zemis or departed ancestors. The offerings represented the best of the harvest and included large perfectly formed shellfish and fine specimens of adult animals.

Inside the caney the worshippers would break a hole at the bottom of the ceramic pot, thus allowing the spirit to depart. Then the pot with the broken out bottom, along with its contained offerings would be placed on the dirt floor of the caney. The ceremony ended with singing and dancing and the redistribution of food by the chief and the priests. The offerings in the caney would be left to rot and remain undisturbed until the next year when the ceremony would be repeated and new offerings and pottery would be placed on top of what remained of the old ones.

Sometime around the era of Christopher Columbus, the Taino vanished from St. John. Their exact fate remains a mystery. They may have been wiped out, enslaved, or forced to flee with the arrival of warlike Caribs to the area sometime before the arrival of Columbus, or they might have met a similar fate at the hands of Spanish invaders following in the footsteps of Columbus. (When part of Columbus' fleet sailed past the northern coast of St. John in 1493, the crew, as well as their Taino captives, reported St. John to be uninhabited.)

At any rate, for the next 200 years, the crumbling remains of the abandoned village were covered over by natural vegetation and windblown sand from the nearby beach.

When the Danes colonized St. John in the early 1700s, they established a plantation at Cinnamon Bay. They cleared and terraced the land, planted crops and constructed buildings scattering and discarding what little remained of the ancient village. The area once occupied by the Taino caney was covered over by a road built to connect the north shore plantations with the main Danish settlement in Coral Bay.

The plantation at Cinnamon Bay went through its own cycle of development, prosperity and decline. By the end of the nineteenth century the profitability of colonial plantation agriculture had degenerated to a point that the grand sugar and cotton estates of St. John were sold or abandoned. Cinnamon Bay was no exception and during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emphasis shifted to the more humble endeavors of bay rum production, cattle raising and subsistence farming.

By the time Cinnamon Bay became the domain of the National Park in 1954, even the old plantation road had reverted to bush. The Taino village and its holy caney appeared to be erased from the face of the Earth and from the memory of man.

That is, until 1992, when National Park archeologist, Ken Wild, sunk a two-meter square test hole in the very same spot where an ancient Taino community had congregated long ago to worship their gods.

Wild was quickly rewarded with the discovery of a complete turtle shell right below the surface. As the dig continued, he found layer upon layer of decorative ceramic pottery, animal bones, unopened seashells, jewelry-like adornments, and tools made of shell and stone.

At the depth where artifacts ceased to be found, a depression in the sand indicated that at one time a large post, apparently a column for a structure of some sort, had been set in that spot.

What Ken Wild had come across were the remains of the caney.

Describing the nature of the offerings, which have been radiocarbon dated between about 1000 and 1500 AD, Wild remarked, "Most of the artifacts that we're finding are ceremonial-type objects associated with the chief, or cacique as they called him. The shellfish are huge, and have not been opened. The skeletal remains of the animals are also large. We're not finding anything that doesn't seem to be the very best."

Archeologists attempt to learn about people and their culture by observing the artifacts they leave behind. In the Virgin Islands, as well as in the rest of the Caribbean, this has been complicated by several factors, the greatest of which was the intense disturbance of the land in the days of sugar cultivation. Trees were cut, vegetation was burned, and the land was dug up and terraced. Natural disturbances such as displacement by roots and the activities of deep burrowing animals also resulted in the moving about and mixing up of artifacts. At Cinnamon Bay, however, the archeological site happened to be protected from both man and nature.

"We just got real lucky," Wild said, "they decided to make these offerings in a place where there weren't a lot of plants or animals. Only a couple of hundred years after the Taino left here, the Danes built a road over this very spot. Where there is a road, you don't have any agriculture that mixes things up or any plants or trees growing over it. So since the Danish period this has all been capped off and protected."

According to Wild, this is the first time in the history of Caribbean archeology that a caney has been excavated and the associated offerings were still in place. This is not only because of the protection provided by the road, but also has to with the fact that in other areas of advanced Taino culture such as Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, the inhabitants were generally farmers. As such, their offerings to the zemis took the form of their finest examples of their agricultural harvests, which in a short time decomposed and disappeared. In St. John, however, where farming did not play as important a part in the dietary needs of the people, the offerings were of a more durable nature, such as whelks, conchs, shellfish, animals and turtles.

"What makes this site so important, not only for St. John and the Virgin Islands, is that everything seems to be right where they left it, in place, as they were making these offerings for 500 years. So we have a wonderful opportunity to actually put a lot of ceremonial objects and religious icons that we have from Hispaniola and Puerto Rico into chronological order and learn how the society changed through time," Wild explained.

The team at Cinnamon Bay uncovered three different pottery styles, matching pottery found in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, where it is believed that Taino culture originated. The different styles correspond to different periods of cultural development.

Pottery is made of clay. It is not carbon based and thus not suitable for radiocarbon dating. In Cinnamon Bay, however, each pottery style was found in separate and distinct layers; there was no mixing of styles. Out of the hundreds of pottery shards found, not a single shard of one style was found in the same layer as shards of another. Because the pottery was encountered along with organic (carbon based) material in the same layer, they could, for the first time, be dated, which would give researchers a good clue as to the age of corresponding styles found in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.

Another significant result of the dig is that archeologists used to believe that the inhabitants of St. John and the other northern Virgin Islands were a lesser-developed indigenous culture, which they called "Eastern Taino" as opposed to the "Classic Taino" of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. The dig at Cinnamon Bay, however, unearthed artifacts, which are only associated with the Classic Taino, such as a carved stone head from a duho, the intricately designed ceremonial stools used by the Taino chiefs, and ball belt fragments, paraphernalia used in the ritual ball game of the Classic Taino. Now it is known for certain that Classic Taino culture extended to the Virgin Islands

Fortunately, this archeologically significant excavation was begun before the forces of nature intervened to make it impossible. The beach at Cinnamon Bay has been eroding at an alarming rate. Just 40 years ago it extended about 250 feet further out to sea than it does now and Hurricanes Hugo, Luis, Marilyn and others have accelerated the process. The Caney now lies just a few yards from the shoreline would soon have been washed away and lost forever. Time was of the essence; the dig needed to begin right away, and this would require a significant amount of money, something that cannot always be found so easily and so quickly. This is where another stroke of luck came into play. Part time St. John resident Donald Sussman learned about the dig and its potential, and with his generous donation, the project was able to begin.

Thus, through the fortuitous combination of such diverse factors as the building of a colonial road directly over a prehistoric Caney, the unlikely decision to perform the dig in that very spot, and the success in finding last-minute financing for the project just before the site was washed away by the sea, our little island of St. John has been placed in the forefront of the archeological investigation of the Taino people, who inhabited these islands many centuries before the arrival of Columbus.

Those interested in visiting or volunteering are encouraged to show up at the lab, located at the end of the road that leads to the beach at Cinnamon Bay, Tuesdays through Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.

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