Captain Kidd (pub)

Transcription

I'm the dean of the School of Health, Physical Education, I'm sorry, Health, Physical Education, which is really Kinesiolgy, and Recreation. I'm going to, very briefly, talk about the rest of the story at the end where we're going from here. We have a very distinguished guest with us today. I just want to recognize Francis Soto. Would you stand, Francis. Francis is the head of the preservation unit, the archeological preservation unit for the Dominican Republic government. He's been very responsible for the exhibit that you're going to see and also for the wonderful relationship we at IU have had with the Dominican Repubic government for well over 20 years. If it weren't for Francis' trust in the work that we do, none of it would have gotten done, so, Francis, thank you, and thank you for coming. [applause] I don't think he's ever coming back in February. [laughter] I'm going to introduce two people I want, well, two or three people I want to recognize. One is Mr. Charles Beeker, who is the Director of our Underwater Archeology progam in HPER. He and Francis have worked together for well over 20 years. I'm a new Dean and I've been here for about seven months and I had to, of course, go down to the Dominican Republic to see myself, because when somebody says there's been a [inaudible] for God and country, you have to go down and see for yourself. And I was just absolutely blown away and amazed. Also, Charles Beeker's collaborator of many years is Dr. Jeff Conrad who will be speaking first. Dr. Conrad is the Director of the Mather's Museum. He is an expert on art and culture which you'll be hearing about tonight. And he is also a professor in the Department of Archeology. Also, I'd be remiss not to mention Cathy Larson. If you would just stand, Cathy who is my partner in conspiracy. She is the Associate Dean of the college and also went with us recently to the Dominican Republic where we met the administer of culture, the administers of public health the director, the president of the university and I'll speak a little more about that at the end. We're going to have a reception after this, but I don't want to waste any more time. It's better to listen to them than to me, so I'm going to introduce Dr. Conrad. Thank you. [applause] Just want to make sure our microphones are working. That one's on. This one's on. Here we go. Okay. The first part of our title and that's really my part is Columbus and the Taino. If you count from my first season in the field - first season doing archaeological field work. I've been an archaeologist for 42 years. I've worked in some pretty high profile places like Peru. I love the Taino but everybody wants - I have not in 42 years - I have never had seen a public reaction like the reaction to Captain Kidd. It's just amazing the extent to which this has captured the public imagination, but I didn't set out to work on Captain Kidd. A year ago I didn't know he was going to enter my life, much less take it over. What I want to talk about is the work that really got us to the Dominican Republic in the first place which is the study of early interactions between Europeans and Taino - the generic term for the native people of the largest Caribbean island in the Bahamas. If you look at human history and look at sort of transformative processes or anything, you know, what is that eight can pick any number of things that really changed the world in the way we live in it. On that list you have to include the unification of the old and new worlds into a single world you can't leave it off. It's one of the - once that happens then globally people, plants, animals, diseases, ideas start to move, change everything for everybody. And it's my privilege to actually be able to study that firsthand. In the place where it really all begins on the island of Hispaniola the eastern two-thirds of which are today's Dominican Republic we have sort of two places where we've been working down in the southeast here and we'll get back there because that's Captain Kidd but I'm going to talk a little bit about our work on the north coast in the vicinity of a place called La Isabella which was the first Spanish town in the Americas founded by Columbus in 1494 and more or less abandoned by the end of 1498. Working around La Isabella there's three things to study - there's the ruins of the Spanish town itself. We don't do that - that's been done previously. Native Taino sites in the vicinity of the Spanish town -that's my part of it and Charlie's part - the shipwrecks and Isabella Bay. La Isabella itself is not a focus of my particular fieldwork but I can't not - shouldn't ignore it. This is a reconstruction of the Spanish town. That's the powder house, the customs house, warehouse, upper-class housing, church, that's Columbus's house and this is where the bulk of the population lived, probably in a fairly Taino way. Just to show it's real. That's what's left of Columbus's house under a protective roof that's a reconstruction. Just to show you that the place is real and that helps to me make the events that happened in and around it real. Customs house - biggest building. Moving on to what I particularly am doing. I am looking at the native Taino sites around La Isabella and these are the people to bear the first sustained continuous interactions with Europeans. These are the people who first feel the brunt of the unification of the old and new worlds and what goes on out here on Hispaniola eventually gets transferred to Mexico and Peru and the rest of the the Spanish Americas. First you got to find sites before you can do anything else so reconnaissance survey looking for sites is part of what we do. This was a promising looking place that didn't produce anything - wasn't a site. This is a promising looking place that did. There's a good classic but somewhat dirty piece of Taino pottery. So you begin to get a build-up an idea of the distribution of sites where people were living across the landscape and then you pick the ones - you can't excavate them all so you pick the ones that you think are mostly going to give you the most insight into the questions that you're asking. Along this ridge which is the first ridge back - you can see Isabella Bay there in the background is a site called El Tamiringo. We've conducted excavations there twice, most recently last summer because it's produced data that are important for our purposes. Just a shot of our excavations. Chris [inaudible] here is in the audience. Jenny Riley, I don't know if Jenny's here, but another one of our students who has worked on this. It's just broken pieces of pottery. It's not really glamorous. It's dirt and broken pieces of pottery