Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CUBA: In Search of the Island’s First Inhabitants

Patricia Grogg* - Tierramérica

SAGUA LA GRANDE, Cuba, Jul 4 2005 (IPS) - Archaeological digs in Cuba could turn today’s theories about the earliest humans here and the Antilles on their head. “We are just at the beginning of it all,” says German archaeologist Jean Weining a bit cautiously.

His appraisal comes after six weeks of patient topographic work to determine where future excavations will take place.

Weining’s Cuban colleague Raúl Villavicencio just smiles, standing at his side. Surely passing through his mind is a rapid succession of images from more than a decade of an intensive search for any possible trace that completes – with due scientific rigor – the puzzles of their archaeological discoveries.

His obsession began around 1987, when he began work as the director of the History Museum of Sagua La Grande, a city of 60,000 people located in the north of the central province of Villa Clara. “I’d go out in the field, leading a group of archaeology hobbyists, to look for things for the museum,” he recalls.

One day in 1992, an enormous piece of carved silica, similar in shape to a bicycle seat was found in a stroke of good luck. It was registered in the museums archives as the first of several tools presumed to have been used by primitive humans in the region.

“They’re hand axes that weigh eight to 10 pounds (3.6 to 4.5 kg), made using a technique similar to instruments used in the Old World some 35,000 years ago,” said Villavicencio, who stresses that the proven history of the first inhabitants of Cuba so far dates back no more than 5,000 years.

“These instruments are a unique phenomenon in the Americas, similar to the European ones in their style and form. We see this as the external frontier of the diffusion of the Paleolithic around the world. They could be remnants of the Paleolithic that reached this continent,” he added.

The discoveries include knives, arrowheads and scrapers also made from siliceous stone, abundant in the stretch of the mountain range northwest of Villa Clara. “This mineral is a variety of quartz, very hard and fitting for ancient man to confront fear,” says the expert.

Villavicencio associates these tools with the remains of wildlife from an era when large animals and giant birds were abundant, uncovered at different archaeological sites, spread as far as 40 km away from each other. “We excavated 10 cm at a time, and along with the bones we began finding manmade tools,” he said in describing the findings.

According to the Cuban expert, this aspect was of special interest to Hansjürgen Müller-Beck, professor of prehistory and early history at the University of Tübingen, in Baden-Württemberg (southeast Germany), who led a team from his country in a research project being carried out jointly with Cuban experts.

Müller-Beck says the contemporary nature of the animal bones with the tools “is irrefutable because if the humans lived in a later era than the fauna, the tools would have been above them” in the soil, according to Villavicencio.

But Weining, who works for the German Pro-Arch, a private archaeological research company, says he prefers to think “about the whole, and not about the parts.”

“The axes are one point. The bones of a different type of fauna are another point. The artefacts another point. The (carbon) dating another. All of this is like a mosaic formed by tiny pieces that we have to investigate,” he explains.

The joint project with the German specialists, titled “Cuba’s earliest settlement,” completed a first phase in which sites were evaluated for new excavations in Villa Clara and in the eastern province of Holguín, also included in the plan.

According to Weining, excavations are slated to begin in January in open fields and in caves, using internationally recognised techniques and methods, to gather a large amount of material intended for achieving a greater goal: verifying when the first humans arrived in the Americas.

It is known that hunter-gatherer communities were established in the Holguín region of the Levisa River around 5,150 years ago, says Uruguayan expert Lilián de Moreira, history professor at the University of Havana.

That date is the earliest proven for the Caribbean settlement in the Greater Antilles. In the Dominican Republic, similar communities were established some 4,550 years ago.

Nevertheless, many Cuban archaeologists believed even before the 1992 discoveries that because of the type of handiwork of the siliceous stone tools found in Cuba, the people who made them had to arrive on the island 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Those findings could prove that human presence here is much earlier, and raises questions about the origins of the first residents, who according to the most widely held theories would have arrived in the Caribbean some 10,000 years ago from the southwest of North America, along routes that emerged during the final part of the fourth glacial period.

The research project is supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, a German non-governmental organisation created to promote science. Cuban backing comes from the Central-Eastern Department of Archaeology of Holguín and the Centre for Environmental Studies and Services of Villa Clara.

(* Patricia Grogg is an IPS correspondent. Originally published Jun. 25 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)