On the southern tip of the France’s Caribbean island of Martinique is a 7,000-square metre site containing the remains of an Amerindian settlement dating from between the 4th-7th centuries AD. One of the largest pre-Columbian, Amerindian sites of the Lesser Antilles, the arc of islands stretching north and westwards from the Venezuelan coast to Puerto Rico, it was discovered partly under the tennis courts of a Club Med hotel resort during extension work.
The site lies on a thin peninsula, the Pointe Marin, lined on one side by beaches and palm trees and on the other by mangroves. “It was known that the site held Amerindian remains,” explained Anne Hoyau-Berry, an archaeologist with Martinique’s cultural affairs services. “During cleaning work around the mangrove, shards of broken pottery and other signs of ancestral presence were regularly picked up.” But the richness of the site and its origins, that of a community from the Saladoid culture, was unknown.
The Saladoid culture originated in what is now Venezuela, comprising four subcultures stretching principally from 300BC to around 550AD. Members of its seafaring population migrated to settle in the Lesser Antilles archipelago and also Puerto Rico.
In France – Martinique and its neighbour Guadeloupe, further north, are French départements, like 96 similar administrative areas, equivalent to a county, on mainland France – a site known to contain archaeological remains is not automatically excavated. But a dig was decided after the Club Med applied for a construction permit, in order to establish whether the area deserved preservation and further searches.
The excavations were carried out between April and June this year, ahead of the rainy season. “We dug below the level of the sea, and very close to it,” recounted Guillaume Seguin, the head archaeologist at the site. “So we had to set up pumps to clear the water to facilitate the extraction of everything that we found.”
What they found at the site, estimated to be more than 1,500-years-old was extraordinary, including 250 vessels, 14 human graves, fragments of carbon, strings, bones – including those of animals now extinct on the island – and also petroglyphs, the carved stones which were a common feature in ancient Amerindian cultures.
“The vessels, in which the bases had been removed by the people of that era, were piled one on top of the others, in a manner so as to form a well to capture fresh water from underground,” explained Seguin.
The pottery, alternately coloured red or black and decorated with drawings, is not the first of its kind to be found in the Caribbean region (other items were found at several sites in Barbados, and at another in Guadeloupe) but, in the words of Seguin, “none could be compared with what we unearthed here”.
Like all those involved with the excavations, the archaeologist cannot hide his wonder at the findings. The man in charge of the Club Med’s expansion work, Damien Monleau, was also impressed. “Once you get over the added cost [editor’s note, close to 1.5 million euros] that it entailed for the company, it’s impossible not to be moved by it,” he said.
A different reality to the colonial narrative
The local academic profession has hailed the contribution that the many discoveries at the site will make for a better understanding of the region’s history. For it was only in 2005 that the first teaching post in Caribbean archaeological studies was created at the University of the Antilles, which has campuses in both Martinique and Guadeloupe, well after the creation of local archaeological services on the islands in, respectively, 1986 and 1992.
“For a long time, the only points of access to this history were the accounts of 17th- and 18th-century chroniclers – the priests Du Tertre, Labat or Breton,” commented Susana Guimaraes, curator of the Edgar-Clerc Archaeological Museum in Guadeloupe. These were the accounts of life and society in the Caribbean region, published in numerous books by missionaries who had travelled there to evangelise the native populations. They reflected a colonial view, punctuated with myths that are still put about today.
“Three waves of populations shaped the demography of the Antilles,” explained Benoît Bérard, a lecturer in pre-Colombian archaeology at the University of the Antilles. “Around 7,000 years BC, a first wave came from the zone of north America, then another from [what is today] Venezuela, with a common genetic heritage according to DNA data, and lastly the European wave, as of the 16th century.”
The European arrivals in the Caribbean region, principally made up of the Spanish, French and British, initially lived in a tense cohabitation with the established Amerindian populations, who refused to give up their land. That would degenerate further into what was a form of ethnic cleansing by the Europeans.
What is known as the 1660 treaty of Basse-Terre, named after the town in Guadeloupe where it was signed, was an agreement between France and England on one side and, on the other, 15 chiefs of the Amerindian Kalinago people, who originally came from the north-east of the South American continent, who had settled many centuries earlier on several islands of the Lesser Antilles. Supposedly a treaty to bring peace, it in effect consigned the Kalinago to separate reserves on the islands of Saint Vincent and Dominica.
Dominica, which was firstly a French colony before the British became its colonial ruler in 1763, and which finally gained its independence in 1978, still has a reserve for the Kalinago who were granted a certain political and cultural autonomy.
“A knowledge of Amerindian history allows a re-positioning of the past of our French territories within American history, and no longer solely in French history,” said Susana Guimaraes. However, there appears to be little public enthusiasm for embracing the until-now largely ignored ancient heritage. “One is forced to recognise that the interface with the general public remains hardly dynamic,” commented Benoît Bérard.
Some, however, seek to integrate, even appropriate, this history into the issues surrounding contemporary society in France’s Caribbean territories, already occupied with multiple and sometimes conflictual questions of identity. While some local politicians seek independence from French rule, the history of the Amerindian populations strikes a contemporary note in as much as it contains a wider Caribbean dimension, that of an archipelago, the Lesser Antilles, which was reduced by European colonialisation to a series of isolated islands
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.