Historical Artifacts Found on Little Jost Van Dyke

~~Adz:Right~~ TORTOLA, BVI -  The Department of Culture recently received a report which revealed that over 1,300 pieces of artifacts were found on Little Jost Van Dyke this summer when a team of students from the University of California, Berkeley conducted an archaeological expedition there.
 
The students are part of an historic period archaeological project which is being led by PhD student Mr. John M. Chenoweth.  The artifacts were described as mostly broken pottery and glass.  The ceramic production date for the collected artifacts is 1762, while the date obtained from measurement of pipe stems is 1735.

In his report Mr. Chenoweth stated that the dates confirm their suspicion.  “These dates confirm our suspicion that this site has excellent potential to tell us about a time when few written documents are available for the BVI, and to tell us about people like the enslaved Africans who were held here, whose lives were rarely recorded in historical records,” he said.

The overarching goal of this project is to tell the story of the site and all those who have lived and worked there.  “Our goal is to understand all these people as parts of larger communities, and also as unique individuals who are the product of all of these influences and others,” Mr. Chenoweth said.

In his report he wrote that an additional goal is to gain anthropological insight into the present and into human life generally, through in-depth study of local, small-scale stories and past lives.  “The project seeks to do this by understanding how people on the site lived their day to day lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” he explained.

Mr. Chenoweth said the work revealed the site’s main feature to be two concentric foundation walls and a stairway almost certainly the site’s main house in the middle of the 1700s.  The team identified other features which included an oven, cistern, field terraces, one additional possible building and several possible graves.

Other interesting finds include a well-used gun flint and a cowrie shell, the latter of which has significant meaning for several African traditional religions and cultures.

The artifacts were all analysed and catalogued by the Berkeley team, and are being stored at the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College. 

One of the major goals of the project is to identify the area where the island’s enslaved Africans lived and this will be the team’s primary goal when they return next summer.

This project was undertaken with the collaboration and assistance of the Department of Culture, local non-profit groups, British Virgin Islands Heritage Conservation Group and the Vanterpool family.  Funding was provided by the Stahl Foundation for Anthropological Research and the University of California, Berkely.