DID THE CIBONEY PRECEDE THE ARAWAKS IN ANTIGUA? Fred Olsen On March 8, 1970, Desmond Nicholson, one of the top sailing skippers of the Carib­ bean, drove over from English Harbor to Mill Reef, Antigua, to show me some stone chips he had just found. He wanted my opinion as to whether these were different from those found in the local Arawak middens. He said he had found the chips at Deep Bay, diagonally across the island from Mill Reef; more specifically at a lagoon which I recog­ nized as the "Salt Pond" near Hog John Bay (Fig. 1). Then he startled me with the question, "Do you think they are Arawak tools?" I looked carefully at the chips and agreed that they were different from Arawak flints I had seen in that there was a much larger proportion of blades, that they were larger and more carefully formed, and that they showed more secondary working than was common with Arawak flints. Furthermore, these chips were not made from the brown chert ordinarily used by the Arawaks, but were blue-grey in color and of a smoother texture. Growing impatient at my slowness in answering him, Desmond blurted out what was on his mind, "Could they be Ciboney tools?" So as I examined the stone chips with a hand lens, I speculated about the similarity in shape (Fig. 2, .A-B) between these knife blades and the three or four Ciboney tools I had obtained from Haiti. They certainly seemed to have the same kind of secondary flaking that I had seen illustrated in technical reports from Cuba and Haiti on the Ciboney tools. But before admitting the possible similarity, I parried with a question as to what else he had found with these flakes. Desmond produced half a dozen conch shell celt forms, several of which were so well made (Fig. 3) that they were above the average quality of similar Arawak celt-like tools. These were the tools presumably used for gouging out the charcoal left from small fires set along the trunk of a tree in making dugout canoes. Then Desmond came out with the item he, with difficulty, had held back, "And there wasn't a single pot sherd anywhere!" This was really important. "How about shells?" I asked, since Meso-Indians were large consumers of shell fish. 'They are there in quantity. Turkey-wings, chip-chip, mangrove oyster, West Indian Top shells and, of course, conch." This was quite in line with a Ciboney site, but the strongest point in favor of a Meso-Indian site was a negative one--the absence of pottery. "Why don't you come with me and see the site? " asked Desmond. "Fine." I replied, "How about tomorrow ? " Salt Pond Site So next morning at 11:30 we met at the "Salt Pond, " as it is known locally, near Deep Bay (Fig. 1). The Salt Pond is quite extensive and along its western shore is a beach ten to fifteen feet wide. Much of it was quite damp but several patches were dry. I was aston­ ished at the amount of stone knives, scrapers, waste flakes and even cores as well as conch celt forms lying on the surface (Fig. 5). There was hardly a square yard without an artifact and in many places a dozen small flakes could be picked off a square foot. We tried using our mason' s trowels and rarely failed to uncover artifacts although we went no deeper than four or five inches. 94 OLSEN 95 Much of the time we waded in water just above our ankles, the lagoon not being more than six inches deep for twenty feet from the shore. Shells were everywhere, black and hoary, with barnacles and other small shells attached. The water was hot, I guessed about 100° F, and very salty. Indeed it was a saturated brine solution, since most of the stones in the shallow water were covered with large salt crystals, many of them more than half an inch in length. The trowel I was using to turn over stones and shells almost invariably revealed stone chips as soon as the fine cloud of mud, initiated by the digging, had settled. The midden was about one hundred yards long and there were local spots where the number of shells and artifacts was greater, perhaps due to separate ancient family locations. It seemed to me that two main centers of activity could be identified about 50 yards apart, possibly where dug-out canoes had been made, since conch celts, flint blades and waste chips were numerous at each place. Perhaps the greater concen­ tration in the east end midden where, we found later, a large, flat, ovale grinding slab had been found a few years earlier. We quickly picked up eight conch shell celts, three of which were only partly shaped "blanks" with no cutting edges yet ground, indicating that tools were being fabricated on the spot. The others had sharp edges and three were very well formed. They were of similar workmanship to conch celts illustrated in some of the technical articles and attributed to the Ciboney in Haiti and Cuba. As we walked along the edge of the Salt Pond, an occasional glance to the north showed that the lagoon was completely separated from the Caribbean by a narrow ridge of sand roughly 150 feet wide and six to eight feet high. I crossed the sand barrier to Deep Bay and noticed that it was low tide there. The variation between high and low tide at Antigua is usually only about one foot, and I wondered if the porosity of this sand ridge was great enough to allow the sea to exert some hydrostatic pressure on the water of the Salt Pond. In reply to my comment on the possibility of any tidal effect on the Pond, Desmond said that he had not seen any daily change in the pond level. What was running through my mind was the large mass of submerged shells and artifacts stretching twenty feet out from the shore. I pictured that Amerinds would normally have lived and worked on dry land so this shore line might have been a foot or two higher when the Ciboney occupied the site perhaps about 2500 years ago. On the other hand, the land at Mill Reef has obviously been rising as can readily be seen from the ancient beach lines which now lie five or six feet above water. Since Mill Reef and the Salt Pond are at diametrically opposite ends of the island, there may have been a tilting of Antigua toward the northwest over a period of thousands of years. In addition to the knife blades and conch celts, I noticed among the great mass of flint chips a number of "projectile points" (Fig. 4) which might have been used for spearing fish after having been mounted in the split end of a long stick and fastened in place with cord made from the strong fibers of the plentiful Dagger or Yucca plants. Also, I picked up a number of flakes that might have been scrapers, chisels or burins, together with a few cores and a number of chips probably waste material from the preparation of useful tools. We did not collect any shells, but even a casual survey indicated that turkey-wing shells were by far the most numerous. This had not been the case in any Arawak midden we had dug in Antigua; so perhaps this was related to different food tastes of the ancient occupants of the site. On the other hand, it might just as well have been that turkey-wing shells thrived in the local conditions of this lagoon. 96 CIBONEY IN ANTIGUA linty,Bay k T. JOHNS ¿^to.on g Bay l.Deep Bay 7.Nonsuch Bay 2.Hog John Bay Ô.Green Island 3.Parham Harbour 9.York Island M-.Maid Island lO.Wllloughby Bay >C^ 5.Cistern Point 11.English Harbour ¿.Pasture Bay 12.Falmouth Harbour MILL REEF 13.Five Islands Bay Bxookslte-* \ Q?p 17 VN 10 ANTIGUA 61^3'W 61%8'w 61^1°43'3 W ^~ Fig. 1. Map of Antigua locating Amerindian sites. Fig. 5. Desmond Nicholson at Salt Pond site holding a conch celt. OLSEN 97 Fig. 3. Conch shell celts probably Fig. 4. Possible projectile points used in making dugout canoes, from from Salt Pond site, Antigua. Salt Pond, Antigua. Dr. Irving Rouse, (1963) in Venezuelan Archeology, traced the known Meso-Indian sites in the Caribbean Islands to Northern Venezuela. He states: "No Meso-Indian sites have been found in the Lesser Antilles. They do occur in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. " At the time of Columbus, a Meso-Indian group called Ciboney was still living in parts of western Haiti and Cuba. The lack of evidence of their presence in the Lesser Antilles has led to the suggestion that Meso-Indian fishermen were driven by storms from the island of Margarita, off the north coast of Venezuela, to His- paniola or Cuba. Thus if the Deep Bay Salt Lagoon site should be accepted as Ciboney, it would no longer be necessary to postulate a storm of such magnitude as to blow the Meso-Indians to Hispaniola, five times the distance from Margarita to Grenada. Indeed, the Ciboney could have migrated through the Lesser Antilles just as the Saladoid Arawaks did later. They might even have paddled from Trinidad to Grenada. I am strongly of the opinion that Ciboney pre-ceramic sites have not been found in the Lesser Antilles simply because very little systematic search has been made for them.