Birgit Faber Morse

An Evaluation Of The Danish Anthropologist, Gudmund Hatt’s, 1923 Santo Domingo Excavations And Collection Abstract In 1923 the Danish anthropologist, Gudmund Hatt, spent a couple of months on archaeological fieldwork in Santo Domingo. His investigations fell into two groups. In the east he made excavations in a number of shell-heaps, primarily at the mouths of rivers and at the center of the island his activities were mainly concentrated in the Constance Valley. He concluded that the Tainan culture originated on the island of Hispaniola and spread eastward and westward from there.

Resumen En 1923 el antropólogo danés Gudmund Hatt realizó durante varias meses excavaciones arqueólogicas en Santo Domingo, donde seleccionó dos áreas de trabajo. En el Este excavó varios concheros contiguos 450 a la costa y en las desembocaduras de los rios; en el centro de la isla su trabajo se concentro principalmente en el Valle de Constanza. Sus conclusiones lo llevaron a proponer que el origen del desarrollo de los Tainos fue en la isla Hispaniola (hoy Haiti y República Dominicana), desde donde se extienden hacia el Este y al Oeste.

Resume Durant 1923 l’anthropologiste danois Gudmund Hatt passa quelques mois en prospectiones archeologiques a Saint Dominque. Ces recherchés porterent des deux groupes. A l’est, il fouilla plusieur amas coquillers sur la cote, essentiellement a l’embouchure des rivieres. Au centre de l’ile, ses activites se concentrerent principalement sur la vallee de Constanza. Il concluait que la culture taino etait issue de l’ile d’Hispaniola et s’y deploya a l’est et l’ouest.

Introduction A Danish-Dutch archaeological expedition that left Copenhagen by ship for the West Indies in December 1921 consisted of Professor J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong, Dr. phil. Gudmund Hatt and his wife, Emilie Demant Hatt, who was an ethnograpfer. They first visited and excavated on the three U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, which Denmark in 1917 had sold to the U.S.A. They reasoned that because these islands are located on the border between the Tainos of the Greater Antilles and the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, an archaeological examinination there should cast light on the interaction between these two Caribbean peoples and their cultures (Hatt 1922, 1924 and 1925). Hatt was familiar with earlier reports from this area, among them J. Alden Mason’s report (1915) and J. W. Fewkes’ “The Aborrigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands” (1907).

De Josselin de Jong left the expedition for the Dutch West Indian Islands, St. Eustatius and Saba in the fall of 1922, when excavations were finished on St. Thomas and St. John and before they began on St. Croix. After Hatt finished his work on the last island during the spring of 1923, he decided to spend a couple of months on archaeological fieldwork in Santo Domingo. His reasons for this were, that after his discoveries in the Virgin Islands he thought that the earlier ceramics from these islands, characterized by white-on-red pottery had originated from the Lesser Antilles to the south; whereas the later ceramics which had modeled-incised pottery had derived from the Greater Antilles to the west (Fig. 1). Hatt (1923) felt that the later cultural development had originated in Hisponiola and wanted to test this hypothesis. His investigations in Santo Domingo fell into two groups, an eastern and a central group. In the east he made excavations in a number of shell-middens on the coast, primarily at the mouths of rivers. In the center of the island his activities mainly were concentrated in the Constanza Valley.

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE The Eastern Group The eastern group included excavation in shell-middens on the northeast coast at the mouths of Rio Nisibon and Rio Maimon (Fig. 1A) and at the southeast coast at the mouths of Rio Chavon and at a sandy beach, called La Caleta (Fig. 1B), west of La Romana. After his excavations Hatt thought that the ceramics had reached a higher development in the southeast, where they were decorated with incised geometric designs that sometimes covered the whole vessel, and the forcefully drawn lines often ended with an indentation, which could have been made with the same tool as the incised lines (Fig. 3a). Relief ornamentation was found mostly in connection with handles, which were often shaped like grotesque representations of the human body, where the head was the most visible part and the limbs were rudimentary, similar to what Hatt (1925) recently had seen in the Virgin Islands and from Puerto Rico. Characteristic also of the pottery along the southeastern coast were broad loop handles with faces in relief supported by a couple of bars, representing arms (Fig. 3b). 451 On the northeast coast the ceramics were less uniform, but also less developed than in the southeast. Relief ornamentation played a greater role; frogs are sometimes represented that way, and where incised lines also occur in combination they are generally rather vague. Loop handles are rare, whereas flat handles with relief faces are common, often shaped like animal and birds heads; they can also be surrounded by representations of limbs combined with the nose and eyebrows in a strange way (Fig. 3c). Hatt (1923) felt that the northeastern ceramics represented a less conventional and more varied form of Taino art than the southeastern, but the area is also located more out of the way and therefore received less influence from outside.

Before Hatt left the eastern part of the island he mentioned a large vase that was rather unusual, since he had not seen any other that was similar (Fig. 3d). It was found at Vacama near Rio Maimon and he felt that it probably was a burial vessel, since it had part of a skeleton represented in high relief on the sides. One side has the skull, the divided lower jaw and three limb bones, and the other side, the back bone and two limb bones and the incised lines connecting the relief work are well done (Hatt 1925, 1932 and 1941).

The Central Group The Constaza Valley is a beautiful, fertile mountain valley, located about 1200 m above sea level in the Cordillera Mountains in the central part of the island (Fig. 1C). The floor of the valley measure about 35 square km. Hatt thought that it had contained at least four Indian settlements and that the name Constanza derived from two parallel earth walls that had been called “la casa de la reina Constanza”. These earth walls that run parallel east-west enclose a rectangular plaza of about 80 by 60 m and were about 1 m high and 4 to 7 m wide. From Las Casas (1909) and Oviedo (1851) Hatt knew that such enclosures or “bateyes” had been found in connections with Taino villages. In Puerto Rico most of these bateyes or ball courts are enclosed with stones, some of which are engraved with petroglyphs (Alegria 1983). In eastern Cuba at Laguna Limones the court is enclosed on all sides with earth walls (Harrington 1921), whereas in the Constanza Valley it is only the two long sides. Hatt discovered seven of these ball courts in the valley; three of the Indian settlements each had two that were lying in pairs and the fields surrounding them were rich in artifactual remains (Hatt 1923 and 1932).

At that time the best preserved of the bateyes in the Constanza Valley was at El Palero; it is located close to El Palero creek on a river plain and its parallel walls enclose a level area of 92 by 35 m and were over 1 m high. Indian artifact were spread over the whole area (Fig. 4a and b), but Hatt could not find any midden or layers of cultural remains. To the west of this court the terrain was covered with small artificial mounds that Hatt also had seen in other parts of the Cordillera Mountains. They were first thought of as being Indian graves, but several were excavated and found not to be so,

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE because they only consisted of stones and gravel mixed with local soil. Instead Hatt thought that these mound must have had some agricultural purpose, since he remembered Oviedo (1851) describing the cultivation of cassava and how the Indians made small mounds for the manioc plants. He also noticed that the local farmers still use the Taino word “conuco” for the small clearings in the woods (Hatt 1925).

Hatt mentions a visit he paid to the most famous batey in Hispaniola, “Corral de los Indios” with a diameter of about 225 m, located north of San Juan de Maguana, which was first described by Schaumburg (1852). He thought that the large enclosure here had belonged to the great “caciques” of the Maguana county, whereas the simpler works in the Constanza Valley were bateyes for the local mountain villages (Hatt 1925).

The ceramic art was highly developed in the Cordillera Mountain. Fig. 4c shows a typical vessel from Manabao; its rim is decorated with incised lines and pits and just one handle is left in shape of 452 a grotesque head with big hollow eyes. Anthropo- and zoomorphic faces with large hollow eyes were characteristic of many of the pottery handles Hatt collected from the Constanza Valley and other parts of the Cordilleras (Fig. 4d). Also found in the same area were fragments of stone idols with deep, hollow eyes that remind one of the ceremic art from the same region. Graters made from stone and porous lava, probably used for grating cassava, were often found in the mountains, as were many crushing and grating stones (Fig. 5a).They usually bore two parallel grooves; between these were often cut a crude representaion of a face, and their undersurface was worn from usage. Petaloid stone celts were also quite numerous in the Cordillera Mountains; three of these are chisel- shaped and one is a double-edged ax.

Only at one Indian site, La Barrera, on the south coast near Azua (Fig. 1D), did Hatt find artifacts of flint. Although the quality of the flint was excellent the implements were crudely made, which stood in sharp contrast to the fine polished stone artifacts that were found at the same place. Most were simple flakes, some of which show marks of usage along edges; there were also a few knifes among them and one flake had a concave scraper edge (Fig. 5b)

Petroglyphs and Zemis Hatt had heard that there were quite a number of petroglyph in Santo Domingo, but he only had a chance to examine two of them. One rock carving was found on a large stone lying on the left bank of the Rio Yaque del Norte, opposite the village of Manabao, in the western part of Provincia de la Vega. It was a dark stone of granit that had a number of small pite cut into the surface. Many of the depressions were in pairs and could have represented eyes, and in some cases these “eyes” were encircled by a groove (Hatt 1941, fig. 2).

A second and more interesting petroglyph was found at Boca del Arroyo, about 25 km east of San Juan de Maguana. It seems to represent two squatting anthropomorphic figures with raised knees and uplifted arms (Fig. 2). Their bodies were represented by simple lines that had little depth. The figure on the right was prolonged downward in a double line and a single shorter line. The last figure ended in an oval in which three shallow pits could have indicated eyes and a mouth. Hatt thought that this picture may have been an attempt at illustrating a birth and that the engraving was a representation of deities of fertility. He mentions that these two figures are very similar to one of the rock carving found by Krieger (1929) in a cave in the province of Samana in northeastern Santo Domingo (Hatt 1941).

Hatt also believed that the bones of the dead, especially the skull, were commonly used as zemis. He felt that the cult of the zemis was reflected in the pottery and that is the reason the face became a favorite motif in West Indian stone and rock carvings (Hatt 1941). He found a few of the triangular

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE stones with human and animal faces carved on them in kitchen-middens in southeastern Santo Domingo (Fig. 5c), but none in the Cordillera Mountains. However here he collected three figures of a phallic character that could be interpreted as fertility zemis (Fig. 5d). On the Indian settlement sites in the Constanza Valley he also found fragments of both the massive (Fig. 5a) and the slender variety of the stone collar.

Conclusion A report of Hatt’s archaeological findings in Santo Domingo was first published in English in 1932 (translated into Spanish in 1978) and later in a 1941 publication on the religious signification of West 453 Indian rock carvings. By that time he felt certain that the roots of the Tainan culture had to be found in northern South America. As support he mentions the writing of Gower (1927) and Loven (1924) among others. He also thought that the Tainan culture had originated on the island of Hispaniola and from there spread west to eastern Cuba and east to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, particularly St. Croix, where he in 1923 had discovered a ball an dance court at Salt River prior to his excavations in Santo Domingo (Hatt 1924, 1941 and Morse 1990).

Hatt felt that certain facts indicated that Puerto Rico may have played a greater role in the Tainan culture area, and he mentioned that the three-pointed stones and stone collars are more numerous in Puerto Rico and on St. Croix than in Santo Domingo. On the other hand he pointed out that his finds in Santo Domingo proved that the highest development in stone sculpture must have been reached here. He also felt that Puerto Rico at that time had benefited from more archaeological research and that could have been the reason. His material indicates, however, that specialization exists in the different types of stone implements and that it should be possible to distinguish between different local styles in ceramics (Hatt 1923). These styles have later been identified as Chicoid from the southeastern area and as Meillacoid principally from the northeastern and central area (Rouse 1951, Veloz Maggiolo 1972).

Hatt was a frontrunner in Caribbean anthropology and his findings from the Virgin Islands and Santo Domingo established the foundation for modern Caribbean archaeology. He concluded that the specialization and growth of the Tainan culture varied in its adaptation to the natural conditions on the different Antillean Islands. He felt that the full knowledge of this specialization would require thorough research of the local styles. This could only be gained by careful and systematic fieldwork, and what so far had been done in Santo Domingo in 1923, including his, was hardly more than archaeological pioneer work (Hatt 1923, 1925 and 1932).

References Alegria, R. E, 1983 Ball Courts and Ceremonial Plazas in the West Indies, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 79. New Haven. Fewkes, J. W. 1907 The Aborigines of Porto Rico and Neighboring Islands. In XXV Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology for 1903-4, pp. 79-85, Smithonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gower, C. D. 1927 The northern and southern affiliation of Antillean culture, Memoirs of American Anthropological Assosiation, no. 35, Menasha, Wis.

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE Harrington, M. R, 1921 Cuba before Columbus, Notes and Monographs, Vol. II, Museum of American Indian, New York. Hatt, G. 1922 Den dansk-holandske arkaeologiske Ekspedition til Vestindien, InGeografisk Tidsskrift, 26 Bd., pp 236-7, Copenhagen 1923 Notes on archaeological fieldwork in Santo Domingo (in Danish and unpublished), National Museum, Copenhagen. 1924 Archaeology of the Virgin Islands. In Proceedings of the XXI ICA, (1), pp. 29-42, The Hague, Holland. 1925 Fra Vestindiens Stenalder. In Nationalmuseets bog on sjaeldne Fund fra de seneste aar, pp. 51-62, Copenhagen. 1932 Notes on the archaeology of Santo Domingo, In Geografisk Tidsskrift, 35 Bd., pp.1-8, Copenhagen. 1941 Had West Indian Rock Carvings a Religious Significance?, Nationalmuseets Skrifter, Etnografisk 454 Raekke I, Copenhagen. Krieger, H. W. 1929 Archaeological and Historical Investigations in Samana, Dominican, Republic, U.S. National Museem, Bulletin 147, Washington, D.C. Las Casas, B. de 1909 Apologetica Historia de las Indias, Ed. Serrano y Sanz, Madrid. Loven, S. 1924 Uber the Wurzeln der Tainishen Kultur, Goteborg, Sweden. Oviedo y Valdes, G. F. de 1851 Historia general y natural de las Indias: I, Lib. V, Cap. I y II, Madrid. Mason, J. A. 1915 Excavations of a new archaeological site in Porto Rico. In Proceedings of the XIX ICA, pp. 220-23, Washington. Morse, B. F. 1990 The Pre-columbian Ball and Dance Court at Salt River, St. Croix. In Folk: Journal of the Danish Ethnographical Society, 32:45-60. Copenhagen. Rouse, I. 1951 Areas and Periods of Culture in the Greater Antilles. In Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 7 (3): 248-65. Schomburgk, R. H. 1852 Ethnological researches in Santo Domingo. In Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Schience 1851, pp. 90-92, London. Veloz Maggiolo, M. 1972 Arqueologia prehistorica de Santo Domingo. Singapore: McGraw-Hill Far Eastern Publishers.

Fig. 1. Map of the Classic Taino area with Hatt’s 1923 excavations in Hispaniola (A - D).

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE 455

Fig. 2. Rock carvings from Boca del Arroyo in the Cordillera Mountains(Hatt 1941, fig. 9).

Fig. 3 a. Two vessel fragments from Rio Chavon. b. Five vessel fragments from La Caleta and Rio Chavon. c. Pottery fragments and ornamented disks (or seals) from Rio Nisibon and Rio Maimon. d. Vase from La Vacama (near Rio Maimon).

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE 456

Fig. 4 a. Vessel fragments from the Constanza Valley. b. Lithic artifacts from the Constanza Valley. c. Bowl from Manabao in the Cordillera Mountains. d. Anthropo- and zoomorphic handels from the Constanza Valley and the Cordilleras.

Fig. 5 a. Cassava grater of porous lava and grinding stones from the Cordilleras and a fragment of a massive stone collar from the Constanza Valley. b. Flint artifacts from La Barrera, near Azua. c. Triangular stones from kitchen-middens in southeastern Hispaniola; one large one with human and animal faces carved on it. d. Three figures of a phallic character that Hatt interpreted as fertility zemis.

XXe CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL D'ARCHÉOLOGIE DE LA CARAÏBE