Taino Today, Part 4: Recent Discoveries at Cinnamon Bay Show Presence of Early Indigenous Culture.

Extract from an article The Source: Taino Today, Part 4: Recent Discoveries at Cinnamon Bay Show Presence of Early Indigenous Culture.

“Wild, who has been based on St. John for 23 years, has worked on archaeological studies on the island since the early 1980s. He’s accustomed to finding Taino sites, dating from around A.D. 900 to 1450, in numerous locations, but over the last three months, he and a team of archaeologists from the Southeast Region of the National Park Service have found a trove of artifacts of a type that he’s never encountered on St. John.

Wild and his colleagues made many of their discoveries in November and December of 2020 while conducting a survey at Cinnamon Bay Campground on St. John.

“We were excavating and we were finding incredible things, I’m guessing from between 100 and 500 A.D. There are layers three feet deep of ceramics – red, black, orange – some that are thin like porcelain,” Wild said. We’ve found a bowl with food remains, probably fish, somebody’s dinner. It’s exciting!”

The campground’s facilities were destroyed by Hurricane Irma in September 2017; one of the things delaying the rebuilding has been the completion of a survey outlining archaeological resources.”

Read the full article about these exciting recent findings at Cinnamon Bay in The Source: Taino Today, Part 4: Recent Discoveries at Cinnamon Bay Show Presence of Early Indigenous Culture.

Photo: Ken Wild stands in an archaeological excavation near the site of the cottages at Cinnamon Bay Campground. (Photo by Kelsey Perrigo)