Day 8: Post Oak Finds A Post Hole- Ren

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Up on Spanish Hill at Kent farm, the archaeology group guided by Dr. Conolley and his crew have been hard at work. Each day, we climb to the top of the hill with our trowels and buckets in hope of unearthing new artifacts that the Taino people may have left behind. As we scraped the dirt away, we would sift through it to look for any shells, pottery, bones or lithics. We had mostly been finding shells and broken pieces of pottery. However, as we hit the bottom of the layer, we noticed two indentations in the layer of the Marl. At first, we didn’t think anything of it but as Dr. Conolley walked over and saw the indentations, he told us that he suspected that they could have been post holes. Post holes are just what they sound like. It is where the Taino people, who were an indigenous Caribbean and Jamaican people, would have placed a wooden post into the ground to support their house. They would have had a center pole that would have provided the main support as well as other smaller post holes around the center one.

To see if they were actually post holes or not, Dr. Conolley dug further down the indentations. His suspicions were confirmed when we found a circular discoloration in the marl. We then dug a cross section to get a side profile of it and see how deep it went. We could clearly see the shape and determined that it was the center post that would’ve supported the Taino house. We had been sitting right where the Taino lived hundreds of years ago!

Once we knew that we had been digging inside one of their houses, a lot of other findings started to make more sense. We determined that the piles of shells and bones that we had found were where they had discarded their food scraps or trash. It also means that the clay pot found during last year’s archeological dig would have belonged to the same Taino household and that it would have been used to cook their food.  It is really fascinating how finding just one small dark circle in the dirt could tell us so much about the Taino people and how they lived.