According to the theory of the expert and Professor Daniel Shelley, its inhabitants belonged to the Casimiroid group, had a very varied diet, and were great fishermen, both on reefs and in the open sea, since they navigated easily in large canoes.
EFE, Santo Domingo
The oldest dwelling in the Antilles dates back some 5,500 years and is located in Samaná, in the northeast of the Dominican Republic, very close to an archaic ritual burial site found last year by the Spanish Dominican archaeologist Adolfo López and his team.
These excavations, led by López, research director of the Guahayona Institute, in collaboration with the Dominican Republic Academy of Sciences and the García Arévalo Foundation, are "completely changing our understanding of the first inhabitants of the Antilles."
Contrary to the previous image of them as "less organized bands of nomadic people, we are now demonstrating that they were human groups settled in specific locations," the archaeologist explained in statements to EFE.
A month ago, they concluded the new excavation, which uncovered this dwelling in another rock shelter very close to the first site. Carbon-14 dating has determined the age of the remains of several homes belonging to the first inhabitants of the island now known as Hispaniola to be 3,500 years BC.
One more step towards understanding the settlement in the area
This new discovery will allow us to understand "how the entire area was populated. What we are doing is spatial archaeology; it's not about excavating one site and leaving, but about working across a wide area to understand how these people moved, where they hunted, where they buried, where they lived, and where they gathered food," he said.
“We are trying to understand,” he added, “an entire settlement area that is approximately 5,500 years old, the oldest found in the Dominican Republic (and one of the oldest in the Antilles). With this excavation, we have located the area where the people who buried the bodies found last year in the burial site near the house lived.”.
The most interesting aspect for the archaeologist is that the conclusions drawn from the initial discovery were confirmed: that "they had an area where they lived and another area where they buried their dead," which gives an idea "of the social complexity of these groups, their very high level of culture, and their level of ritual surrounding death."
These humans lived in large huts, supported by rock shelters, and had a very rich diet, explained López, who is awaiting the arrival of experts from the University of Winnipeg in Canada to study the plant seeds and starches present in the grinding tools found at the excavation site.
According to the theory of the expert and Professor Daniel Shelley, these inhabitants belonged to the Casimiroid group, had a very varied diet, and were skilled fishermen, both on reefs and in the open sea, as they navigated with ease in large canoes.
Were they already farmers?
What remains to be determined, now that it is known these groups settled permanently in one place, is whether they were already engaged in agriculture. Experts from Canada intend to clarify this question if they find cultivable plants among the remains, which, according to the Spanish archaeologist, "is the most likely outcome."
In any case, they had "very advanced customs that allowed them to survive comfortably in the same place," specifically on the cliffs of Cape Samaná, an area they reached from the American continent "or from other islands where they had landed, but their (primary) origin is the continent," as DNA studies being conducted at Harvard University aim to determine.
Undated photograph provided by Adolfo López, showing a person moving earth during an excavation in Samaná, Dominican Republic. (EFE).
López emphasized the importance of these findings: "We are talking about the first inhabitants of the Antilles; we are recovering the origin of the population that lives here today. It's like finding Homo antecessor in Europe," he explained by way of analogy.
These findings are part of the content of a lecture that the expert gave yesterday, Thursday, in Santo Domingo about the first archaic groups that populated the Antilles, all based on the most recent research being conducted.
