Gift of Honduran Artifacts Returned by Anthropology Dept.

TAMPA, Fla. (March 26, 2008) –Is it possible that some gifts are simply too precious to keep? Such was the case of a gift of rare prehistoric pottery given to the University of South Florida’s Department of Anthropology. An important collection of 157 prehistoric pottery artifacts was returned to the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, the branch of the Honduran government that oversees the country’s cultural heritage. The artifacts, which are associated with the prehispanic Pech culture of the eleventh through fifteenth centuries AD, include ceramic bowls, plates, and jars from Roatan Island in the Bay of Honduras, Central America. The collection was donated to USF in 1990 by a Tampa Bay area family after having been recovered from the family’s property on Roatan earlier last century. The Honduran government plans to display the pieces in a new museum being constructed on Roatan Island.
“Much as we have enjoyed having the opportunity to study and display this collection at USF, we believe that the right place for them is Honduras, where they can be exhibited and appreciated by the people of that country,” noted USF Anthropology Chair Elizabeth Bird. “We were delighted to be able to work with the Honduran officials to repatriate this precious collection and we know that the original donors were also pleased to hear that the collection is going home.”
USF Assistant Professor Christian Wells, accompanied the collection to Tegucigalpa. “I have worked in Honduras for nearly 15 years and have never seen such a large collection of archaeological materials from Roatan ever in one place,” he said. “This collection is hugely important because the prehispanic cultures of the Bay Islands are virtually unknown archaeologically.”
The repatriation took place at a press conference at the Ministry of Culture in Tegucigalpa on March 11, where Wells was joined by Honduras Minister of Culture Rodolfo Fasquelle, Director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History Darío Euraque, and the Institute’s archeology chief Eva Martínez.
Wells and his archaeological team from USF, which included Assistant Professor Karla Davis-Salazar and graduate students José Moreno-Cortés and Lorena Mihok, analyzed the collection before it was returned to Honduras. They believe the pottery was probably manufactured by the Pech during the Early to Middle Postclassic period, roughly AD 1000 to 1400. Wells describes the pottery as “shallow outcurving and flaring-walled bowls, plates, and jars, decorated on the exterior with abstract curvilinear scrolls, usually finely incised.”
Wells said, “The Pech are indigenous hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers that occupied the Bay Islands throughout the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. After being displaced to mainland Honduras by Spanish and English settlers in the seventeenth century, the Pech today occupy parts of the north coast of Honduras. As of 2001, the Pech numbered roughly 3,800, making them one of the smallest ethnic groups in Honduras.”
As reported by the Honduran press, the team believes that the pottery was likely used by shamans in ceremonies carried out after the death of a community member. Wells explained that these practices involved drinking fermented (alcoholic) beverages made from yucca or corn and eating special foods such as tamales made of yucca.
“Today, Pech communities along the Moskito Coast continue this tradition, although participants typically use plastic dishware instead of the traditional pottery,” said Wells.

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Basic Helene/Roatan Information

Information on the Paya Indians: Link Length 60 km (37 mi) Width 8 km (5 mi) Largest city Coxen Hole (pop. 5,100) Demographics Population 30,000 Ethnic groups Caracoles, Garifuna Roatán, located between the islands of Útila and Guanaja, is the largest of Honduras' Bay Islands. It is approximately37 miles long, and less than 5 miles across at its widest point. Located near the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the largest barrier reef in the Caribbean Sea, second largest worldwide after Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The easternmost quarter of the island is separated by a convoluted channel through the mangroves that is 15 meters wide on the average. This section is called Helene, or Santa Elena in Spanish. Satellite islands at the eastern end are Morat, Barbaretta, and Pigeon Cay. The most populous town of the island is Coxen Hole, capital of Roatán municipality, located in the southwest. Other important towns include French Harbour, West End, and Oak Ridge, the capital of Jose Santos Guardiola municipality. The pre-Columbian indigenous peoples of the Bay Islands are believed to have been related to Paya, Maya, Lenca or Jicaque, which were the cultures present on the mainland. Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage (1502–1504) came to the islands as he visited the neighboring Bay Island of Guanaja. Soon after the Spanish began raiding the islands for slave labor. More devastating for Native American communities was exposure to Eurasian infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox and measles. Diseases ran in epidemics, and no indigenous people survived. Throughout European colonial times, the Bay of Honduras attracted a diverse array of individual settlers, pirates, traders and military forces, engaged in various economic activities and playing out political struggles between the European powers, chiefly Britain and Spain. In contesting with the Spanish for colonization of the Caribbean, the English occupied the Bay Islands on and off between 1550 and 1700. During this time, buccaneers found the vacated, mostly unprotected islands a haven for safe harbor and transport. English, French and Dutch pirates established settlements on the islands. They frequently raided the cumbersome Spanish cargo vessels carrying gold and other treasures from the New World to Spain. In 1797, the British defeated the Black Carib, who had been supported by the French, in a battle for control of the Windward Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Weary of their resistance to British plans for sugar plantations, the British rounded up the St. Vincent Black Carib and deported them to Roatán. The majority of Black Carib migrated to Trujillo on mainland Honduras, but a portion remained to found the community of Punta Gorda on the northern coast of Roatán. The Black Carib, whose ancestry includes Arawak and African Maroons, remained in Punta Gorda, becoming the Bay Island's first permanent post-Columbian settlers. The majority permanent population of Roatán originated from the Cayman Islands near Jamaica. They arrived in the 1830s shortly after Britain's abolition of slavery in 1838. The changes in labor force disrupted the economic structure of Caymanian culture. Caymanians were largely a seafaring culture and were familiar with the area from turtle fishing and other activities. Former Caymanian slaveholders were among the first to settle in the seaside locations throughout primarily western Roatán. Former slaves also migrated from the Cayman Islands, in larger number than planters, during the late 1830s and 1840s. Altogether, the former Caymanians became the largest cultural group on the island. For a brief period in the 1850s, Britain declared the Bay Islands its colony. In the latter half of the 19th century, the island populations grew steadily and established new settlements all over Roatán and the other islands. Settlers came from all over the world and played a part in shaping the cultural face of the island. Islanders started a fruit trade industry which became profitable. By the 1870s it was purchased by American interests, most notably the New Orleans and Bay Islands Fruit Company. Later companies, the Standard Fruit and United Fruit Companies became the foundation for modern-day fruit companies, the industry which gave Honduras the sobriquet "banana republic". The region of the Bay Islands encompasses the three major islands of Roatan, Utila, and Guanaja, and the smaller islands or keys. These people are also called "Islanders," especially locally. Over time the form of English spoken by the islanders has changed. The language differs mostly in morphology but also in pronunciation and accent and, to a lesser extent, in syntax and vocabulary, from the English of the other British Caribbean colonies. They are similar enough to be mutually intelligible. Information from Wikipedia

Coons in Helene

Monday, July 25, 2011

Cool to See, Artifacts Returned...

Gift of Honduran Artifacts Returned by Anthropology Dept.

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