it's our own living and breathing museum the salt river bay for over two thousand years this area side's share of civilizations from the prehistoric to the colonial era it's where generations of amerindians came to settle and it's also the first place in this region that was touched by the new world but today's reality is that the salt river national park is simply viewed as just a beautiful beach or traditional recreation site sure everyone knows that this is a place that christopher columbus sailed into over 500 years ago but quite often that's as far as historical references go well today we turn back the chapters and revisit the history of this true cruzan treasure with of course help from our friends at the national park service i am dr meredith hardy an archaeologist for the national park service southeast archaeological center people have been living on at salt river for over two thousand years they um i think one of the of the things that makes it so unique is that it's had so many different kinds of people living at the same place for so long you have prehistoric people who migrated up here from venezuela around the orinoco river they traded and interacted with people from puerto rico and hispaniola and antigua and all over the caribbean and even as far away as guatemala and colombia it provides one of the few protected sheltered bays on this entire side of the island it sort of has opening arms to the sea the peoples arrived here in canoes from south america and were looking for a port they could see there was fresh water so they entered the bay and it provided to them shelter from storms natural resources to establish their villages for very substantial forests that they could clear and produce their their villages and then once they were established here it was a base of operations it was easy for them to collect all the food resources they needed there's andy hey welcome to nation thank you hi janisha hi meredith nice to meet you so what are we doing today we're going to explore salt river come on let's go now the building we are touring is the salt river bay national park visitor contact station for many years it served as the home for the come pitch family but in 2003 the national park service purchased the property today it's where rangers meet and greet visitors to the park and supply them with information pertaining to the park and its history it's also the perfect place to get an overview of the bay and take magnificent pictures as we continue our tour of the visitor station we meet up with superintendent joel toutine who joins us on this tour of the park salt river got its name when columbus on the second board in 1493 came in search of fresh water what he found was brackish water now salt river when you look at saint croix 500 years ago it was a very lush very green island you had many rivers and streams running uh all over the island and you had virgin forest it was tremendous i mean the rainfall was nothing like what it is today and therefore you know all those tributaries led right to this uh salt river bay so when columbus got his information that you know he could find fresh water here uh basically the river which is now the sea which has always been the sea was salty those tributaries deposited into the salt river bay area but by the time they it got mixed with the uh with the bay itself it was bracket now while most people know salt river to be the area christopher columbus sailed into on his second voyage they don't see the bay for what it really was a main settling area for amerinians and prehistoric people in fact simply walking through the park you come upon evidence of these civilizations take for example this patch of dirt and shells it may not seem like much but it's actually our connection to those that lived here thousands of years before us here's an example of some of the remains from the prehistoric village that was here at salt river bay um what you see and there's a bunch of conch and some stones but unfortunately it's mixed up with a lot of modern materials cars drive down here when they park at the beach to come camping and stuff and so a lot of the original remains are getting mixed up together it's losing a lot of its um original context what else other than constant constant shells there are remains of pottery there's all kinds of um they would take actually uh the conch and break them apart and make tools out of them so they would scrape things and they would make jewelry out of different parts of it and stuff so this is really more like where they would store all of their things and then make the things that they used every day as mentioned earlier this site is littered with artifacts from past civilizations and settlements two distinct remains are that of an amerindian ball court and an earthen fort this is where we believe the ball court was standing right here okay right and right in these trees somewhere in 1923 an archaeologist from uh the danish national museum named goodman hot came here and he he excavated on st thomas and saint john and at many sites here in saint croix but he spent most of his time here and he discovered a ball court it was lined with stones that had carvings all over them and it was lying right in here and associated uh with this fall court were um whole pots some had burials inside of them like of children who had died um and many other kinds of ceremonial artifacts we're not quite sure what they did with them how they were used in their religious ceremonies but we all we do know that they were all together here in this one spot okay so the ball court had ceremonial purposes also yes um they used they played the ball game actually when columbus came to hispaniola and puerto rico they documented the taino indians they're playing the ball game and they all are the rules and who could play and what kinds of things they did and why they did it to determine um to settle arguments they did it for religious reasons um and then they also did it just for fun men played against men and women actually played against women but you did not have co-ed teams okay well this is where we believe the ball court was it's somewhere in this um vegetation um we have some evidence still of it there's some pottery actually here on the ground that looks like see right here and right here yeah that you know it could probably be a thousand years old we would have to do some tests on it but to do those tests there's um you have to get permission from the national park service and from the virgin islands government for scientific research only we don't allow people to just come along here and uh pick up souvenirs if they're walking through the woods and stuff because if um because if everybody came to pick up a souvenir pretty soon there'd be nothing left yep east of the park lies fort soleil which was built by the dutch in the 1600s we are at the top of fort soleil sum we believe it was they began to build it in 1642 it's built by the dutch um but what they used when they built it it's all made of earth they used part of the prehistoric midden from the village so what you find in the ground up here is actually parts of the prehistoric pottery and shell and everything but it's been reused and they used this fort until um the until the end of the french period which is at 1696. the french abandoned the island they couldn't they were not able to make a lot of money from sugarcane plantations and then when the island was sold to the danes in 1733 1732 um the danish military also used the sport but it was it did not have um the same prestige as it did during the 17th century okay so how large was this structure um it's actually quite large it had three bastions three corners of the triangular port um and there was actually some archaeology that was done in the 1970s um unfortunately we don't have all of the results from their expeditions but we do know that um there were the soldiers were living here they had families i mean it was it was a village it was a small town sitting out here you may be wondering why more hasn't been done to excavate study and restore the fort and ball court well unfortunately the park service doesn't own the land that contains the structures yes they're located in the salt river-based site but they're not part of the national park system but what is part of the national park is the former anderson collection a collection of artifacts that were gathered from salt river bay and other locations around the island well right now we're in the museum collection room which is secured in fort christian vern so could you tell us a little bit of what we're watching here meredith okay um these are artifacts from the fulmer anderson collection fulmer anderson um was he was a worker um at the bethlehem sugar works in the early 1900s and he would go out to um to fields that were freshly plowed and collect artifacts he was not an archaeologist but he had enough of an interest in it that he he knew that many of these um sites would probably be destroyed in the near future so he went ahead and collected many artifacts and um we're lucky in that he collected all kinds of things he didn't just collect really pretty pop tea collected tools and shells and bones and all kinds of things so what i put out for you today is a variety of the different kinds of tools that people use 2000 years ago up to the arrival of columbus they had all kinds of stone axes and silts you can see here where it's been grooved so you can actually tie it with ropes onto handles and then you can use it to chop down trees another and things like this could be used for hose to help dig to plant your crops they had um all kinds of they would grind stone into balls and use them to smash you know to get at shia meats and the seashells and all that kind of stuff and these are smooth then they use these to grind down all kinds of things maybe to help grind down shells parts of conch shells that they would use for tools as well um maybe different kinds of um fruits and nuts and all kinds of things they would use so these are examples of that this stone here you see that there are some lines that are carved in here they would use these to help grind stones to make beads okay like this ah they're nice and smooth yeah and round like that and then they would come on the ends and drill very slowly to make it an actual beat so then they could shoot them and use them for doing it now other kinds of stone tools these are small um what we call silts and axes now remember i was talking a little while ago about um there were trade relations they would have contacts of people from venezuela maybe colombia and guatemala some of these stones are made of a material called jadeite and we've conducted um chemical tests on some of these stones and we found that actually the jedi that they used in many cases came from one place in guatemala that mayans also used so we don't know what the connections were if they were trading along the coast and went all the way around the caribbean or if they went there directly we don't know but there's some kind of connection there um let's see so these are more shell tools we call them scrapers they could have used these to help make pots they could have used them to help make wooden chefs or weapons and other kinds of tools and things the there's a long held tradition that the arawak people were very peaceful and the care of people were very war-like yeah in reality there's no such thing okay um people fought and competed for land and all kinds of things and so all kinds of people use all kinds of weapons and things so many of these tools we have to try and interpret them for many other kinds of uses um now here we have these um these kinds of shells and you'll notice that many of them have holes in them and what they would do actually is they would string all of these up and they would be like noise makers we call them tinklers and we have many many many of these all over the place and these are carved pieces of shell we find many pieces that are carved like frogs okay and they're drilled so they would wear them as decorations and some of these they are carved to look like crabs and then these are bone beads they take actual like bird buns and carve them up they made um they would take maniac and make cassava bread that's a very famous thing to me so these are the grills that they would use after they made the bread and then they would fry it on this it's very interesting on the underside of this there's a basket weave oh so they would make the so they would make these griddles and put them out in the sun to dry and the pattern of the baskets that they would set them on got put into got put into the clay here it's a neat little insight into um how they lived into what kinds of things that they did it also lets us know that they had many other kinds of tools and materials that did not preserve like baskets tell the story definitely now the earliest people in synchroid had two different kinds of pottery this is the famous pottery if you call it white on red and it's very well made it's very well painted as you can see it's very distinctive and you see this all over the caribbean from about 400 bc to about 400 a.d the second kind of pottery you find is this and you'll see that there are very fine incisions and it's very distinctive different kinds of design elements over here now we're not quite sure if these are two different kinds of people two different societies different religions kind of like catholic versus protestant um but it's um it's interesting it's interesting and there's not many places on saint paul where this material comes from from a few sites the designs and then do they tell some sort of story or something i believe they do people don't go to a lot of effort to decorate things if they don't have some kind of meaning to them and do you see anything that connects the two possibly on the design not really on design but the fact that many of them came from the same site okay so if they were two different cultures or two different societies then they were interacting very closely okay so it may not have been a different time it might have been the same time yes same time period okay so here you have a bowl it might date to maybe 200 bc and you'll see that the images of birds yes with the painting now you'll notice that the kind of red painting it's not quite as good as that stuff so this is a little later in time period so maybe maybe not 280 maybe around 400 or 580. how significant does the shape in the form of the pottery what does it do for time and time um well the different kinds of we can trace back through time by looking at the different styles to see what were kind of the um the trends that people were making um many of these forms we can trace back to south america at this time they're about 500 bc sometimes beyond that on the orinoco river and then over time they change so you can um you can follow those changes and i see here this one is pretty large that's a pretty big pop it's pretty big what do you think this pot may have been used for um it was probably ceremonial okay this is a lot of again a lot of effort and um time and we don't even know where some of these paints came from like the white that they used for the clays in here um if they're going to a lot of efforts to obtain these materials then you're not going to use these to cook your dinner every day yesterday so and we have plenty of other pots that are very plain and i think those are the ones that they use every day every day yeah let's let's oh boy oh yeah we'll pull this one out here's another ceremonial like pot and you can see it looks like there's flippers so it's either a turtle or some kind of a of another sea animal like this and i see here that you guys have you know a lot of comments yeah do you guys have to mend them well this is what fulmer anderson did he would find these basically like broken in place so he could reconstruct them but in the 1930s the way you did it was by using metal staples it's not the best way to do it we need to um start working on these pieces and conserve them in the proper way so we'll have to take out all of these metal pieces but he did a good job for his time period he did a good job thank you thank you let's get this on here um we tend to call these pot stamps and it looks like they would put them in the fire and then put something over it so the pots weren't sitting directly in the side right okay it's kind of like this this is a little a little fun just like a little cup very simple okay see this is something that they might use every day it's a little drinking cup maybe eating some of their one pot or their pepper pot if ever so i've shown you some of the decorated pottery these are some of the plain pieces of pottery that you know as we discussed they would have used for everyday cooking and stuff we also believe that many of these are later in time period these are after eighty six hundred maybe nine hundred to one thousand um and again the structure of it tells you that let's see you can do this okay so as you can see it's not as proportional it's not as well made the um the decorative pieces are a little simpler and you see very simple faces there's like a mouth and eyes and stuff um this is from later time period about 900 to 1080 and many of these large pieces actually came from the salt river site the whole pieces what do you think makes make these structures you know made different like i mean you say that these weren't made as great as the ones before where were the tools they had or um i think part of it is a loss of knowledge over time over many generations you just don't you're not teaching the same kinds of techniques another um belief is that what they thought of as valuable goods changed that's true so their uh their beliefs changed their religions changed they didn't give as much emphasis to making pottery as they did let's say carving stones for hall courts that's another interesting piece you and these are all shaped like boats yeah kind of they look like big canoes and this is from that later time period as well so their views look a little more simplistic versus the detailing in the movie obviously okay we talked about the ball court and that they played a ball game for many reasons one of the artifacts that we find at ball courts especially in puerto rico or they called them stone collars and they were whole pieces of stone carved and ground and they had little carvings on them and we're not we don't know what they use them for they're like trophies okay uh it's hard to think that they would wear them while they were playing because they're very heavy but we have remains of these stone collars here on saint croix so this shows that they were playing the game not just at salt river but at other places across the island too so this is an example of part of one of the stone collars the end is nicely ground here it looks like it might have broken and then they use it for some other reason sometimes these are also called elbow stones because it looks like an elbow yes it does and this is even later this is like a d one thousand to twelve hundred this is taino times okay um i know the ballpark was used for religious purposes and recreation um i heard something earlier about sometimes when you have fights or anything do you think this could possibly have been as a weapon this i don't think so i know there's no real life from puerto rico there's never evidence these are weapons they were either trophies or had that had something to do with the actual game i want to thank you zandi and meredith so much for you know the interesting experience i've had today i've learned so much and i would say it was great back into the past learning a little bit about our history here on st thank you so much our pleasure i'll see you guys again hopefully sometime soon yes of course well there's more adventures thank you we still know so little about the ancient peoples who first came here to sanctuary we don't we don't even have a good radiocarbon date that says when they first arrived here all we have is pottery and we can compare the pottery to um archaeological sites and other islands but we don't have an early yet so we don't know how they really lived and what kinds of plants they grew and how they live their lives so much history in front of us and many of you probably didn't even know that it was there but you know what that's what makes santorini such a special item i want to thank you for joining us today and always remember to cherish your home this beautiful island but most of all cherish each other i'll see you next time you