7 a Preliminary Report on the 1980 and 1982 Field Seasons at Hacienda Grande (12 Psj7-5): Overview of Site History, Mapping and Excavations
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7 A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON THE 1980 AND 1982 FIELD SEASONS AT HACIENDA GRANDE (12 PSJ7-5): OVERVIEW OF SITE HISTORY, MAPPING AND EXCAVATIONS PETER G. ROE INTRODUCTION Viewed from many perspectives, Hacienda Grande (12PSJ7-5) is one of the most important sites in Puerto Rico. It is central to the history of Greater Antillean archaeological investigation since it is the eponymous site for the identification and first publication of the earliest documented ceramics in the chronology of the island, the "Hacienda Grande" phase of the Saladoid stylistic series (Alegría 1965:247-248; Rouse 1964:503, Fig. 5). Nearly every major figure, and most minor ones, active in scientific or avocational archaeology, or just plain "pot-hunting," in Puerto Rico have "worked" the site or studied collections from it. From the vantage point of intrinsic culture-historical interest, as a huge multi-component site Hacienda Grande contains perhaps the longest, richest and most continuous cultural succession, from Igneri to Pre-Taino and Taino, in Puerto Rico. Furthermore, it lies in close proximity to the island's first published preceramic site, Cueva María la Cruz, 12PSJ7-1, 152 (Alegría, Nicholson and Willey 1955) and shares some aspects of its material cultural assemblage with it. Lastly, the geographical location of the Hacienda Grande site, and its ecological setting on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico, the eastern-most of the Greater Antilles, accessed the cultural influences which moved with the major currents and prevailing winds from the island stepping stones of the Lesser Antilles during Pre-Columbian Neo-Indian times. The site lies within Rouse's Sonda de Vieques (Vieques Sound) culture area (1982:47, Fig. 2), dependent as it was on sea-born, rather than land-based communication (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, due to some thirty years of persistent looting, the site is also the focal point of a coastal plain-wide crisis in the management of the Pre-Columbian cultural resources on the island. A laudatory and newly enacted local ordinance will not save it in the face of a lack of enforcement capability and the absence of supporting legislation on the Commonwealth level. Yet even in its present sorry state as a gouged and pock-marked cadaver, the Hacienda Grande site still holds abundant data to address such current research questions as the priority of ceramic/agricultural migrations in Saladoid times or the post-Saladoid dietary shift. Beyond these questions of the contents of the badly-disturbed midden, when viewed as an ossuary, the site represents a vast bank of virtually intact human osteological information vital for addressing the still-untold aboriginal physical anthropological history. Lastly, present research has revealed that the site is even more 153 internally complex than had hitherto been supposed and many of the zones of occupation thus isolated still await systematic excavation. Currently, Hacienda Grande is the subject of a detailed report on the 1954 Alegría and Nicholson cataloged excavations (Rouse and Alegría, ms.). The intent of this paper is more limited; to present some preliminary results from two seasons (1980 and 1982) of test excavations at the site directed by myself as part of a field school in archaeological method and a research program into Puerto Rican prehistory sponsored by the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y_ el^ Caribe. The Centro, under the direction of Ricardo Alegría, who was also the first to publish the results of excavation at Hacienda Grande, has a special interest in reexcavating the site. The program of which our own restudy is a part represents an effort to systematically retest noted northeastern and southeastern Puerto Rican coastal sites with the research objective of coupling the traditional stylistic study of ceramics as space/time indicators with investigation into the related prehistoric ecological, technical and social adaptation of Amerindian cultures to an island environment. This research is being carried out from the perspective of cognate lowland South Amerindian prehistoric and ethnographic societies (Raymond, DeBoer and Roe 1975; Roe 1982a) and incorporates a new methodology of generative design analysis (Roe 1980; 1982b) to relate the hitherto useful but autonomous concept of style (Petitjean Roget and Petitjean Roget 1976) to eco-technology and society (Veloz Maggiolo 1977:8) in an 154 Antillean setting (Roe 1982c). The program began in 1978 with excavations at Luquillo Beach, the Monserrate site, on the northeastern coast, continued through testing of the Caracoles site in Ponce on the southeastern coast in 1979, and the two seasons at Hacienda Grande on the northeastern coast in 1980 and 1982 (the year hiatus of 1981 was produced when I was in the Peruvian jungle doing ethnographic research) to culminate in 1983 at the site of Ojo del Buey near Dorado on the north-central coast. The field school lasts for six weeks each summer, from early June to mid-July and involves theoretical, field and laboratory components. Aside from the excavations at Tibes (Questell 1983) and El Bronce (Robinson, Lundberg and Walker 1983), the Centro program represents the largest scale and most sustained program of excavation on the island in recent years. These excavations take on added significance given the current predominant role of contract archaeology in Puerto Rico which reallocates effort from excavations to site survey. In view of this situation, emphasis has been placed on the publication of the field school's results in addition to its didactic functions. Both independent publication and publication as Master's theses through the Centro will be used to disseminate the information. This and the following paper constitute reports on only four phases of the program's work at Hacienda Grande: the mapping, excavation, lithics and human osteology. Other reports are in preparation on the ceramics, faunal and malacological aspects as well as the earlier work at Monserrate (Hamilton 1980; 155 Pantel 1981; Roe 1979a). GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING The site of Hacienda Grande is located about 25 km. to the east of San Juan and immediately south of the present town of Loiza on Puerto Rico's northeastern coastal plain. The site is some 1.21 km. from the unnaturally-straight present course of the largest river on the island, the Rio Grande de Loiza (probably canalized in colonial times) as it debouches into the Atlantic and is surrounded on both sides by old mouths of the formerly meandering Rio Grande. Just to the rear of the site is an ancient oxbow lake remnant of a former main channel of that river (Carbone 1980b:38, Fig. 8; see my Fig. 4), an indication that the site was closer to fresh water in aboriginal times than it is at present. Furthermore, while the site lies some 1.56 km. from the current seashore, there is also evidence that it was located much closer to salt water in aboriginal times as well. Ever since the late Quaternary the low alluvial land the site occupies has been actively prograding due to eustatic rise and possible climatic shifts (Carbone 1978:19). Hacienda Grande itself sits halfway up the most extensive series of fossil beach ridges and relict shorelines on the island. This regime continues to Punta Vacía Talega on the west and Punta Miquillo at the mouth of the Rio Espiritu Santo to the east. These beaches were formed when the sea was some 2-3.66 m. below current levels. The site's mid-point 156 location within them opens up the possibility of using other dated archaeological sites in the region to establish a relative chronology based on these fossil shorelines. The idea first articulated by de Hostos in 1919 (p.378), that the largest sites in Puerto Rico are found on the south coast where the protected leeward side of the island and the existence of a wide and shallow coastal shelf aided exploitation of that region by Amerindians with primitive water craft, is still widely held. Hacienda Grande is clearly an exception to that pattern since the site is found on the northern windward side of the island. Yet there may be an explanation which could cover both cases. There appears to be a particular concentration of big sites (both early and late) in the northeastern region of the north coast of Puerto Rico. In the area covered by this report alone one finds the huge sites of Monserrate, Hacienda Grande and Vacía Talega (Fig. 3). These sites continue until the area of San Juan, which is also the area where the protecting fringing barrier reef ceases and the waves of the deep waters pound the shore directly. Since all of these north coastal sites lie in areas protected by the reefs, which foster the development of lagoons and concomitant moluscan fauna as well as providing an analog of the protected south coast's shallow anchorages, their appearance may not be coincidental with the reef development. Such is clearly the case with the Hacienda Grande site (Fig. 4). As one who has experienced the difficulty of navigating even the wide major tributaries of the Amazon like the Ucayali during high winds and waves in wooden dugout canoes, even manned by such 157 experienced canoemen as the Shipibo, I can appreciate the attractiveness of such sites from the point of view of Puerto Rico's similarly equipped early inhabitants. The site is cradled to the south and east by several mogotes, or isolated Tertiary limestone outliers of the coastal hill chain. These Lower Miocene knobs are honeycombed with solution caverns such as the famous preceramic Cueva María la Cruz less than 500 m. to the west of Hacienda Grande across the present route 188, or the smaller Cueva Mela located on the southern periphery of the site itself.