Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

30 / Chapter 2.
Back in Jamaica, Woodward has ongoing excavations at New Seville, which
have produced and no doubt will still produce further surprises. She has reinvestigated
the Spanish sugar mill previously excavated by Cotter, and by López
(1982, 1986), and has demonstrated that this was driven by water and not by
animal traction. In the process, she discovered the workshop where the carved
stones were created, and these are now being studied.
Also ongoing have been excavations in the Annotto Bay area conducted by
a joint team from the University of the West Indies and Murray State University
( Allsworth- Jones and Wesler 2003). The site of Green Castle (Y25) was
investigated between 1999 and 2001. The scope of the investigation was then
widened to include more sites, such as Newry (Y27) and Coleraine (Y19), and
Wentworth (Y8) farther to the west, in 2002–2003. Details concerning this
work are provided in the list of excavated sites. All the sites produced radiocarbon
dates, which are summarized in Tables 6 and 7 and Figure 27 in Chapter
7. Broadly speaking, the range of dates corresponds to that from White
Marl, which is not surprising, since the archaeological material also belongs essentially
in that category. Two human burials were discovered at Green Castle,
one an adult, the other a child, and for once these burials were examined professionally
in situ by a physical anthropologist, Ana Luisa Santos. Fragmentary
human remains were also found at Coleraine, belonging to a minimum of two
individuals, one an adult, the other a juvenile. Except for the first year at Green
Castle, the abundant faunal remains were studied by Lisabeth Carlson, who
commented on their excellent state of preservation. Green Castle produced almost
21,000 individual specimens, which as Carlson says, represents “the largest
analysed faunal sample from Jamaica to date” (Carlson 2002:6). The other
sites produced a further 13,000 specimens. The inhabitants of the sites were
primarily fisher folk, but terrestrial resources were not neglected either, particularly
the hutía. The study of the hutía remains has contributed to the debate
about whether these animals were in some way managed, if not domesticated,
by the Taíno. In general, the investigations at the sites have been intentionally
interdisciplinary, as well as educational, since students from the University of
the West Indies have been involved in the work every year.
Finally, mention should be made of a study of the area between the White
and Rio Nuevo rivers by Jo Stokes, which may reveal what Lee’s survey missed,
that is, the smaller settlements that undoubtedly surrounded the larger ones,
which form the heart of his map. So far as Rio Nuevo (Y4) is concerned, Stokes
has taken up where Vanderwal left off, and among other things has shown that
at this site (as at White Marl but so far nowhere else) layers of marl were delib-