HISTORICAL NAERATIVES AND FIELD WORK 29 



of artifacts, such as shell utensils, shards of broken pottery, and 

 implements of flaked stone. 



Above this layer is a deposit varying from a few inches to 2 feet 

 in thickness belonging to historic times. This upper culture layer is 

 nondescript in the extreme and includes fragments of pig, cow, and 

 other animal bones, also coconut and calabash shells. Tools of iron, 

 including a Spanish ax, were recovered from the vicinity of impro- 

 vised fireplaces. Some of the more habitable caves occasionally 

 are still occupied by Dominican fishermen and farmers who come to 

 the south shore of Samana Bay to tend their fish pots and to work 

 in their small potato, coconut, and banana plantations. One large 

 cave at the head or western end of the bay near the mouth of the 

 Barracote River is occupied in season by a number of Colorado 

 wood {Rhizophora mangle) " mangle rojo " or tan-bark peelers, who 

 work in the swamps during the day but find the cave shelter a satis- 

 factory temporary domicile. 



Covering much of the interior floor of the caves are large deposits 

 of bat guano, which have been extensively exploited for use as a 

 fertilizer, and small deposits of pellets from an extinct species of 

 giant owl. The removal of guano disturbed some of the culture 

 deposits and thus hampered scientific investigations. Archeological 

 investigations in caves in Cuba and Porto Kico have revealed 

 human burials underneath the midden deposits. These burials 

 have been ascribed to pre-Arawak aborigines. Their undeformed 

 crania differ from those of the xVrawak whose skulls are uniformly 

 artificially deformed. No skulls were recovered from underneath the 

 Samana cave middens by excavating, although a few human bones 

 and teeth were exhumed from low levels. Cuban finds were not 

 duplicated in the Samana caves where careful search failed to 

 reveal burials of any description. Cave burials have been discov- 

 ered in the mountainous interior of the Province of La Vega, prin- 

 cipally in a cave near Manabao. Numerous rock ledge burials with 

 deformed and undeformed crania were discovered by the writer 

 in Samana and La Vega Provinces. It is not known whether 

 the skeletal material extracted by native Dominican investigators 

 from Manabao belonged to the Ciboney or to the Arawak, that is, 

 whether the crania showed anterior flattening or not. 



In Samana, as in the caves from other provinces, surface finds 

 were distinctly post-Columbian, while the extensive middens of 

 aboriginal origin contained rude artifacts of shell and bone and of 

 flaked stone; however, but little of those artifacts that have come to 

 stand as sponsors for pre-Columbian Arawak culture, namely, 

 polished stone implements and unpainted earthenware with incised 

 or otherwise applied conventional decorative designs. 

 54291—31 3 



