Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

14 / Chapter 2.
He had intended to continue the work on a larger scale, but this was prevented
by his sudden death in 1965. A report on the 1964 excavations was subsequently
prepared by Silverberg, Vanderwal, and Wing (1972), but obviously
this is not a substitute for the complete monograph that Howard would surely
have published had he lived. In his first three seasons, Howard excavated three
middens, and also a bigger area between them, in an endeavor to find postholes
that might be indicative of house structures. In this he did not succeed. He
did however confirm earlier observations by J. S. Tyndale- Biscoe (1954) concerning
the presence of marl layers, which he thought might have been deliberately
created from time to time in order to “sweeten” or “freshen” the site. In
1964 Howard excavated two trenches in two middens, A (to the north) and B
(to the south), as shown by a “schematic representation” in Silverberg and colleagues
(1972:Figure 3). This is the only plan we possess of the site (Appendix
30). The midden deposits were more than 7 ft deep. There are 11 radiocarbon
dates from Howard’s excavations, which, uncalibrated, span the range
from a.d. 877 ± 95 to a.d. 1490 ± 120.
Howard’s work was carried on by R. L. Vanderwal, a former graduate student
of his. Vanderwal excavated at White Marl in 1965, 1966, 1967, and
1968, as we know from his master’s thesis (Vanderwal 1968a) and from two
unpublished reports that he submitted to the Institute of Jamaica in 1967
and 1968 (Vanderwal 1967, 1968d). During these operations, Vanderwal confirmed
what Howard had suspected, that White Marl had been occupied during
the historic as well as the prehistoric period, although the deposits in the
main part of the site had not been disturbed by this. The unpublished papers
in the Institute include a stratigraphic profile, to a depth of 7 ft, from square 13
I (Appendix 31). This is one of the squares in Howard’s mound B, but presumably
the unsigned profile was the work of Vanderwal. It is the only stratigraphic
drawing we possess from the site. It is clearly schematic, but it does indicate well
the way in which the deposits alternated. The final work to date at White Marl
was carried out by James St. Clair in 1969. He claimed he had found what had
always eluded Howard, postholes forming a hut foundation (St. Clair 1970),
but since no supporting evidence was ever published there is no means of assessing
the validity of this claim. It should be noted that over the period from
1958 to 1969, 15 burials were excavated at the site, with 16 individuals, of
whom three were children. These discoveries finally dispelled the notion that
Pre- Columbian burials were confined to the caves.
In 1965 a museum and laboratory at White Marl were opened and were
managed by Vanderwal and his successors for the Institute of Jamaica. The