Days old post...

Playing catch up, this post is from a few days ago...

Today was a hot one! It was a very sunny morning with a heat index 102 degrees and the afternoon winds that usually help cool things off were nowhere to be found today. I drank all 3 of my liters of water before lunch when that amount of water usually lasts me all day, yikes! Despite the heat, we accomplished a lot today and I’m feeling pretty good about that. 

We opened a third unit, Unit 5, in the middle of an established structure near the main house and will hopefully be able to discern what the building’s purpose was from this season’s excavations. The previous archaeologist who worked on the site left poor reports of his findings and may have been off in his assessment of the structure as a kitchen/slave barracks, so it will be very interesting to see what we find! Based on a previous investigation of the structure’s wall profiles we are inclined to think that it may have been some kind of workshop as quite a bit of iron and glass slag, a stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore, were found. However we are also finding a good deal of ceramic sherds, bones, sea shells, fish scales and even the fragment of a kitchen knife so as of now it’s still a conundrum.

We’ve only been in the field for about three weeks now although it seems like much longer. My hands are finally starting to callous over previous blisters and get used to the daily beating. What we archaeologists lovingly call ‘trowel hand,’ or something of a decrepit claw, is in full effect for my right hand and getting there for my left. Being an archaeologist is like aging prematurely…all your joints ache and lock up from all the crouching, crunching and manipulating yourself into these small earthen torture chambers otherwise known as excavations. We keep joking that we won’t know if any of us catch this newly hyped mosquito-born pathogen Chikungunya, of which a main symptom is arthritis-like joint pain, because our poor joints are already abused on a daily basis. Thankfully the mosquitos here aren't that plentiful and the ones I have seen/been bitten by so far haven’t been the crazy Asian tiger mosquito that hosts the disease so there shouldn’t be much cause for worry…. I hope! 

In setting up the new unit we had to pull back the tarp that had been protecting the structure to find three giant, albeit harmless, toads and a well-established, very harmful fire ant colony! The new unit is not too far off from the ants and I feel it is only a matter of time before an incident occurs. I am getting pretty good at avoiding the little buggers though and after being covered with black bitey ants in Belize last summer, and I mean literally having ants IN my pants and shirt...basically all over, all I have to say is, ‘bring it!’ 

A photo of the ant colony near Unit 5

I mean just look at that stinger....yikes!!

It seems the more I travel, the more insane insects and diseases I encounter (so far the majority of them in Belize) and there’s usually an adjustment period where I think, ‘Why the fuck do these things even exist?!’ but then I have to admit that they're fascinating creatures. I can’t say the project volunteers agree with me though, haha. Usually when I start rambling about this crazy bug or that deadly disease they just look at me like I’m crazy for ever wanting to work in Belize in the first place let alone go back for more. Well, I must be a masochist because given the opportunity I just can’t stay away!

Hacienda history in a nutshell...

I suppose before I go on talking about Unit this and Unit that, it might be good to give a brief summary of what this project is and why we’re digging here to put us in context, eh?

An acquaintance of mine from Temple University is doing her dissertation project at Hacienda La Esperanza, an historic sugar plantation located in Manatí, PR and is conducting both archaeological and ethnographic research in order to discern the social importance of class and race relations on the plantation during it’s heyday. The Hacienda is a 2,265-acre estate located in the fertile valley of the Río Grande de Manatí, about 35 miles west of San Juan Bautista, Puerto Rico’s capital city. It is bounded to the north by the Atlantic Ocean; to the west by the river; and to the east and south by haystack hills that are part of the Karst Region of Puerto Rico running eastward from Carolina to Aguadilla on the north-westernmost tip of the Island.

At its peak production, over 150 slaves worked the estate. It was their blood, sweat and tears in the fields that was the driving force behind the sugar industry boom and yet so much of their history has gone unnoticed. Some excavations and interviews were done in December so this season we are continuing to build upon that foundation of information.

Compared to other colonies, Puerto Rico was relatively late in importing enslaved Africans for plantation work. The Hacienda La Esperanza, however, once had one of the largest enslaved populations on the island. Founded in the 1830s by Fernando Fernández, a wealthy Spanish merchant and military man, la Esperanza was one of the most prosperous and mechanically advanced plantations of its time. It wasn’t until after Fernández’ death that the plantation really flourished and his son, José Ramón, joined with Philadelphian George C. Latimer to form Latimer & Fernández Co. Together became one of the most influential merchant firms in PR and by the 1860s José Ramón, named the Marqués de la Esperanza, was one of the wealthiest men not only on the island but in the entire Spanish Caribbean. 

With the abolition of slavery, however, production vastly dropped at Esperanza as it did on plantations elsewhere in 1873. José Ramón did what he could to make up for lost slave labor by mechanizing the Hacienda and installing a rare West Point Foundry steam engine sugar mill, but racked up considerable debt in doing so. Then after José Ramón’s death the plantation went bankrupt and was sold. The new owners could not recover from the financial devastation and by 1889 the sugar cane was gone completely, the property already transformed into a cattle ranch.

Plantation owners during the 19th century greatly impacted the social structure of the plantation’s cultural ecosystem by managing enslaved people’s space and behavior. 

Unfortunately many of the original structures on the plantation such as the slave barracks have not withstood time. Through excavation and analysis we hope to ascertain where the barracks were and gain more insight as to just how these socially differentiated spaces and management of goods and behaviors by plantation owners affected the enslaved people’s culture, identity and general way of life.  It is an interesting project because while there are some written records accounting for enslaved populations during this time, such as the Slave Census of 1870, there are still large gaps in understanding what their lives were like. 

The first two units we dug this season were located where the project director thought the barracks might have been based on an old 20th century map of the property and ground penetrating radar (GPR) done prior to excavations (within the red rectangles on the topographic map below).

The shaded figure in the lower right corner is the main house.

From what we can tell so far those units did not yield any evidence of occupation, but in examining the artifacts from Unit 4 we may learn some things. Next we will be opening units within structure ruins, known as Feature C, from which we hope to learn the building’s use and whether it was a kitchen or a workshop. Depending on how these excavations go, we hope to have time for one more unit and crack at finding the barracks.

The Fideicomiso de Conservación de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Conservation Trust) has restored some of the remaining structures of the plantation including the main house and the sugar drying house and offers tours to the public.  

The main house before and after restoration.

(Above) The original blood mill, powered by animals or slaves, which required people to manually place the cane into the rollers in order to press out the juice. All too often, hands or arms would accidentally (sometimes purposefully, for punishment) be crushed between the wooden rollers (hence the name).

Good links to peruse for my fellow nerds and history buffs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ramon_Fern%C3%A1ndez  

http://www.fideicomiso.org/hacienda-la-esperanza-eng/