Dr. Alice Samson (5:03)

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (5:06)

In this series, we have learned about Columbus's arrival in the Americas and the later conquest of the Aztecs. But I would like to ask you about Spanish colonization of the Caribbean. How did it begin and what did it involve?

Dr. Alice Samson (5:24)

Yes, thank you very much. That's a really good question. So when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and his exact place of landfall is still kind of hotly debated among many people, we can ask ourselves whether that really matters. He encountered people who he thought were the Chinese or Japanese. He wanted to trade with the Grand Khan. He did not meet these people. He ended up in the Caribbean, a place that he actually, you know, came to love. He writes very fondly about the Caribbean and did kind of throughout his life. But it set off a whole train of encounters between Europeans, people of African descent, and Africans and local populations in the Caribbean, who at the time of the European sort of encounter, were very diverse, very diverse group of people speaking different languages, belonging to different ethnic groups. There was a huge amount of contact between the islands. So these were communities who spanned different.

Unknown Speaker (6:22)

Islands and frequently traveled between them, which.

Dr. Alice Samson (6:24)

Is something that we don't really see nowadays in the Caribbean Due to that colonial legacy, the islands are still very much kind of divided according to those colonial boundaries.

Unknown Speaker (6:32)

In the pre Columbian Caribbean, the sea.

Dr. Alice Samson (6:34)

Is often referred to as a kind of liquid highway or kind of connector between the islands. So there was a lot of toing and froing, a lot of diversity in these islands. When Columbus rocked up, there's still quite a lot of debate about the type.

Unknown Speaker (6:48)

Of societies he encountered.

Dr. Alice Samson (6:50)

So some archaeologists and historians talk about sort of hierarchical chiefdoms in the larger islands, such as Hispaniola, which is nowadays Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. But you also have hunter gatherers, mobile groups of hunter gatherers in places like Cuba, and also perhaps more egalitarian societies in some of the smaller islands. But to be honest, we can debate a lot of that on the basis of the archaeological and historical evidence. A lot of the historical evidence, of course, comes from these Spanish accounts with their particular worldview and expectations when they arrived in the islands. And so we rely on archaeology to understand more the encounter from indigenous points of view.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (7:32)

And what kind of resistance did the Spanish encounter?

Dr. Alice Samson (7:39)

That's a good question. So they were met with in many different ways.

Unknown Speaker (7:43)

So we have a period which archaeologists.

Dr. Alice Samson (7:45)

Often refer to as the contact period, which was time of Columbus's first voyages, when he was turning up on beaches with a bunch of other kind of sailors. And the interactions that they had are referred to as kind of reciprocal gift exchange. So Columbus came along, his boats were already stacked with things to exchange with, you know, foreign peoples, as was kind of common when kind of discovering new.

Unknown Speaker (8:06)

Lands or finding new trading partners.

Dr. Alice Samson (8:08)

So he brought all kinds of things with him, such as beads and rosaries and glass and ceramic table wares and things to exchange with local people. And the people he met in the Caribbean were very glad to exchange, exchange things with Columbus and his sailors. Columbus famously, when he sort of first got off the boats, one of the.

Unknown Speaker (8:27)

First things he did was to give.

Dr. Alice Samson (8:28)

His necklace or his rosary to an.

Unknown Speaker (8:31)

Indigenous chief, who in turn gave his.

Dr. Alice Samson (8:34)

String of beads, called cebas, to Columbus. There was lots of exchanges of clothing.

Unknown Speaker (8:39)

So in this period, we can say.

Dr. Alice Samson (8:41)

That in these sort of first encounters we can say that this was a kind of mutual interest, mutual interaction, mutual exchange of goods. And the character of these exchanges very quickly changed. I would say that he was not always met with enthusiasm. So there are accounts, for example, in the northeastern area of Hispaniola or Dominican Republic, the Bay of Samana, where he was met by community with bows and arrows who were really quite violent towards him.

Unknown Speaker (9:12)

Probably because they'd heard down the line.

Dr. Alice Samson (9:14)

From others that these encounters weren't always something necessarily to be desired. But certainly there was a, yeah, a deal of kind of mutual interest and.

Unknown Speaker (9:26)

Reciprocity in these first interactions. People even exchanged names with each other.

Dr. Alice Samson (9:30)

There was a great desire to get to know each other on both sides, I think, to get to understand what kinds of people the Europeans and Africans were meeting. And in terms of the kind of local Caribbean people, local Caribbean communities that Columbus met, again, they were very diverse and spoke different languages. So Columbus often picked up someone to.

Unknown Speaker (9:49)

Be a, serve as a translator.

Dr. Alice Samson (9:50)

And they would get somewhere and be like, well, I don't understand what they're saying because I don't speak that language. Columbus himself, within a very few days of arriving, or maybe even the first day. I can't quite remember which diary entry it is now, but he says, even though I could not understand a word of their language, we seemed to get on pretty well. I pretty much understood what they said. I understood all kinds of complex things, like they don't appear to have a religion. That was one of Columbus's first assumptions about these people. And you wonder how on earth he could have, you know, you can get quite far with non verbal communication, right? But how far can you actually get with nonverbal communication? So he makes a lot of assumptions.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (10:24)

It's maybe not into deep conceptual features of their world beyond that initial contact period. Then what happens next?

Dr. Alice Samson (10:36)

Well, one of the first things that happens is Columbus establishes a series, or the Spanish establish a series of towns or a series of towns to exploit gold across, first of all, Hispaniola. So he establishes the first town in the Americas, that of La Isabela, on the north coast of what's now the Dominican Republic. This was a resounding failure by all accounts. Established in 1493, it only lasted a few years. The Spanish tried to replicate the kind of medieval town in the Caribbean. They, you know, built the kind of traditional houses, kilns, they wanted to eat their own foods. And basically what we know from the.

Unknown Speaker (11:15)

Archaeology was there was a high degree.

Dr. Alice Samson (11:18)

Of malnourishment, scurvy at this point, the Spaniards weren't so adaptable. They weren't adaptable. They didn't recognize or couldn't. Didn't like eating the local foods, basically. Now, this picture very quickly changed after the failure of La Isabella, but that first attempt was kind of doomed to failure before then. Actually, I should kind of skip back a little bit. One of Columbus's ships ran aground and. And he made friends with a local chief who got his people to collect all the planks and nails and every bit from the shipwreck, bring them ashore. And so Columbus quickly developed a friendship with this chief. He said, I'll tell you what, I'll drop off 40 men. I'll just nip back to Spain. I'll be back in a bit with some more supplies. When he came back the following year, all those men were dead. And what probably happened was that the Spaniards abused the local hospitality, and this was not tolerated. But we don't know from Columbus's perspective, he got a whole series of stories from different people about what might have happened. But this is maybe the start of a rift in relations and a start of kind of unequal and exploitative relations on behalf of the Spanish, who were, as we know, predominantly men, not all men. So there's this kind of myth that it was just kind of Spanish sailors.

Unknown Speaker (12:41)

Male Spanish sailors who came across.

Dr. Alice Samson (12:43)

But we know from excavations of the.

Unknown Speaker (12:45)

Cemetery of that first town at La.

Dr. Alice Samson (12:47)

Isabela, that there were also women and children and sailors of African descent who were Spanish as well, who accompanied Columbus in his first voyages. Nevertheless, yeah, this was the start of these unequal relations whereby basically Spanish sailors abused their hospitality pretty quickly. And then things went downhill from then on. The Spanish had a voracious appetite for.

Unknown Speaker (13:09)

Gold and pearls and preciosities, and they.

Dr. Alice Samson (13:12)

Didn'T really want to farm or work themselves. They want. Hired local people to do that for them and started breaking up then local communities, moving them closer to these newly established Spanish towns. And they didn't call this slavery. It was. The Spanish imposed a system called the encomienda system on local communities whereby each Spanish besino. So an individual of a certain status.

Unknown Speaker (13:39)

In Spain was granted by the Crown.

Dr. Alice Samson (13:42)

A certain number of indigenous workers who were paid. And I put paid between quotation marks there in religious conversion and things like clothing. So the Spanish clothed people in. They thought, you know, they. They met these local people. They were naked and, you know, Catholics didn't like that. So they clothed them, converted them, and thought this was fair payment for extracting their labor. And Breaking up their communities, which is essentially what happened.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (14:11)

It's fascinating to think about that in conceptual terms. I'm struck by the parallels for how they would treat children and people that they thought had learning disabilities. They wouldn't have used those terms, but foolish people at the time, which is that at Henry VIII's court, the fall was paid with provision of food and clothing. And so there is a definite sense of immediately identifying indigenous peoples as being inferior and that justifying this form of slavery by another name, isn't it?

Dr. Alice Samson (14:49)

Yes, I think there's a degree of truth in that, certainly in the Spanish chroniclers. I think it's. Gines de Sepulveda referred to indigenous men as little men. They were quite feminized as well as made sort of childlike and innocent. This is how they were kind of presented, and this was the kind of positive side of things, because the others in the Lesser Antiles, mostly from the Lesser Antilles and other islands, who did not convert willingly to Christianity, or so the Spanish story goes, could justifiably be enslaved. So this is the idea of just war, that you can make war on pagan peoples if they refuse to convert. So it's very convenient for the Spanish to meet a bunch of people who they say wouldn't convert to Christianity, who they could justifiably enslaved. But these people were distinct from those people who they converted and then forced to work for them under the encomienda system. So often in Spanish gold mining areas or Spanish farms, you'll have people from.

Unknown Speaker (15:47)

Different places across the Caribbean, some of whom were enslaved and some of whom.

Dr. Alice Samson (15:51)

Were encomienda indios, encomendados, or what they're called. So people of different statuses.

Unknown Speaker (15:58)

And to all intents and purposes, they all had to.

Dr. Alice Samson (16:00)

You know, they were all undergoing hard labor, and the Spanish kind of fed and closed them. But, yeah, they did make this distinction.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:09)

So can you give me a sense then, of what the immediate impact of encomienda and colonization was on the region's indigenous cultures?

Unknown Speaker (16:21)

Yeah.

Dr. Alice Samson (16:22)

So essentially, I mean, so there is.

Unknown Speaker (16:23)

A myth of indigenous extinction.

Dr. Alice Samson (16:25)

The people in the Caribbean did not go extinct, but there was absolutely big population crashes.

Unknown Speaker (16:30)

We have census data from the 1540s.

Dr. Alice Samson (16:32)

The Spanish were very bureaucratic. They noted down everything. And we have kind of, you know, frankly, terrifying numbers. Terrifying kind of evidence of population demise. Of course, there were also lots of intermarriage, forced or otherwise. And some indigenous communities were less impacted than others. Some fled, maybe higher into the mountains or to kind of undesirable areas away.

Unknown Speaker (16:57)

From Spanish centres of control and persisted like that.

Dr. Alice Samson (17:00)

So there's certainly not extinction by any means, but a big population crash and also a kind of forced displacement of a lot of local communities. So, for example, a site that I worked on for my PhD many moons ago now was an indigenous town site in the Dominican Republic called El Cabo San Rafael, which is on the east.

Unknown Speaker (17:19)

Coast of the Dominican Republic.

Dr. Alice Samson (17:20)

It was inhabited for over several hundred years, maybe even casting my mind back.

Unknown Speaker (17:24)

Over a thousand years before the arrival.

Dr. Alice Samson (17:26)

Of Spaniards and Africans. And yet in the last, we have.

Unknown Speaker (17:33)

Kind of evidence of a sort of contact moment in the archaeology there.

Dr. Alice Samson (17:37)

So we have Spanish kind of exchange goods and then that community is abandoned. Probably the people were forcibly removed in.

Unknown Speaker (17:46)

1503, 1504, during a series of wars.

Dr. Alice Samson (17:50)

In the region to what the Spanish call pacify local indigenous communities. You mentioned resistance a little earlier. There was quite a lot of armed resistance in this period that went on.

Unknown Speaker (18:01)

For decades and decades.

Dr. Alice Samson (18:03)

And these stories are definitely, definitely kind of quashed and repressed in the Spanish version of events. So you get a hint now and again that there's kind of a lot more going on than just kind of peaceful acceptance and conversion of local populations, because the Spanish, at the same time, they're importing huge amounts of arms, they're waging wars on local people and they're.

Unknown Speaker (18:25)

Burning them in their houses.

Dr. Alice Samson (18:26)

They're facing quite significant resistance from indigenous groups who certainly by this time and.

Unknown Speaker (18:34)

A bit later on, are also teaming.

Dr. Alice Samson (18:36)

Up with other kind of escapees from other kind of religious refugees or kind of Africans as well, who are escaping kind of Spanish control and adjoining forces. Certainly in Puerto Rico, where I'm doing some work at the moment, there were decades of what they call entradas y cavalgadas. So indigenous armed resistance against the Spanish.

Unknown Speaker (18:58)

Although this is not often referred to.

Dr. Alice Samson (18:59)

In the Spanish documents themselves.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (19:02)

So from what you're saying, is it right to conclude then, that resistance could either justify the Spanish colonization and the system of encomienda, etc, because just war, or it's kind of obscured in the sources because perhaps because it's being practiced outside the constraints of just war.

Dr. Alice Samson (19:30)

Exactly, exactly. I think that certainly many of the indigenous people who were rebelling had already been, to all intents and purposes, converted to Christianity and were not kind of slaves, and then they kind of, you know, joined forces with other communities from other islands sometimes, or fled.

Unknown Speaker (19:47)

So there were lots of different types.

Dr. Alice Samson (19:48)

Of resistance that indigenous people practiced. So fleeing armed resistance, you know, sort of full compliance, probably also absolutely genuine kind of conversion and integration. And similarly on the Spanish side, there were those who fled and joined with the indigenous communities rather than face kind of starvation and live in these kind of horrible towns. And unless you were quite a high status Spaniard, I think it was actually very hard to make a living or to have a better life than you had in Spain once you were in the Caribbean. I think this is one of the decisions that were made by a, a.

Unknown Speaker (20:24)

Very small number of elite Spaniards when they first came to the Caribbean, which.

Dr. Alice Samson (20:27)

Was, we don't want to have a kind of, you know, burgeoning working, more middle class or a kind of functioning multi leveled society.

Unknown Speaker (20:34)

No, we actually want free labour and.

Dr. Alice Samson (20:36)

We'Re going to enslave people, you know. So this was one of the early decisions that they made that made it increasingly difficult for anyone who kind of emigrated from Spain of a kind of poorer status or any indigenous people, or certainly any people, anyone of African descent who quickly were like, like they were also of the kind of middle and lower classes in Spain at the time and left Spain often they were working in jobs in ports. African Spaniards were working in kind of, you know, ports and kind of laboring themselves. And they joined Columbus's voyages to get a better life. And this was not, these possibilities were not opened up to them. And they quickly found that out within the first couple of decades of arriving in the Caribbean that they were not going to make a living any easier than they were back in Spain because of the control of this kind of Spanish elite.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (21:23)

So there's a sense that the hierarchy of this new colonized land is set up very quickly. There's a kind of creation of a colonial elite and I imagine that that destabilized existing indigenous leaderships, to say the least. And I want to ask you how you think this influenced the kind of emerging political structure of Spanish America.

Dr. Alice Samson (21:53)

Yeah, I mean, the Spanish were really sort of in kind of disarray, really, especially after the kind of discovery of.

Unknown Speaker (21:59)

Peru and Mexico and the far richer.

Dr. Alice Samson (22:01)

Resources that these places offered. Then there was actually sort of a mass exodus from the Caribbean and the Spanish crown tried to force people to stay. You know, they were like, you know, don't flee the Caribbean just yet.

Unknown Speaker (22:13)

Stay there, stay there. But people didn't want to, especially with.

Dr. Alice Samson (22:16)

Increasing pillaging from the English and the French and piracy. I think it was pretty hard, you know, a pretty hard life. We only get kind of glimpses of this from the Spanish accounts themselves. I think we can tell a lot more from archaeology. You mentioned in your Introduction. The work that I and colleagues are doing on Isla da Mona, there we are witnessing all kinds of interactions between indigenous Europeans and Africans which are not referred to in the kind of traditional chronicles. Essentially, we're looking at rock art to understand the encounter. And there we have conversations between people of all kinds of different statuses and backgrounds about really quite philosophical issues such as religion, which, again, is something that.

Unknown Speaker (23:04)

Is talked about in the official Spanish.

Dr. Alice Samson (23:05)

Documents, but only in terms of, you know, numbers of people converted to Christianity and how grateful they were. Whereas we get a very different view from kind of archaeology.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (23:14)

I will come and ask you a lot more questions about that in just a second because I think it might be helpful if we have some sort of sense of what the introduction of Spanish Catholicism meant in terms of how religion was used as a form of cultural suppression, if that's the right way.

Dr. Alice Samson (23:32)

Of thinking of it. Yeah, I think there were many, many different forms of kind of colonial control, and some of those were intentional, and some of those weren't necessarily intentional. So the kind of, you know, religious conversion was one side of that. Imposition of European clothing, imposition of European.

Unknown Speaker (23:47)

Foodstuffs is also quite an interesting one.

Dr. Alice Samson (23:49)

I would, you know, I think that Caribbean populations, they weren't by and large vegetarian by any means, because they relied.

Unknown Speaker (23:55)

A lot on marine resources, but there.

Dr. Alice Samson (23:56)

Were no large animals in the Caribbean. You know, they ate things like guinea pigs and rice rats and various other.

Unknown Speaker (24:03)

Little furry rodents, sea turtles and lots and lots of fish and shellfish.

Dr. Alice Samson (24:07)

And then when the Spanish came, they.

Unknown Speaker (24:09)

Said, you must eat pork and bread.

Dr. Alice Samson (24:11)

And so this was a huge change, sort of colonization of people's diets and their daily lives on a very kind of intimate introduction of animals such as especially pigs and goats and cows, which.

Unknown Speaker (24:22)

Completely ravaged and changed the landscape.

Dr. Alice Samson (24:24)

So the Spanish very quickly dropped off. Pigs everywhere they went, pigs and goats everywhere they went. And a few months later they came back and they'd increased and, you know, they had a plentiful supply of kind of meat and things like that, but they were not corralled or penned in in any way.

Unknown Speaker (24:40)

And so you can imagine the kind.

Dr. Alice Samson (24:41)

Of destruction that was wrought by these animals. And in fact, I think, you know, in Puerto Rico, you have accounts of. Of free roaming cattle predated upon by wild dogs, killed for their skins, and their skins were basically, you know, ripped off their bodies. The carcasses were left to rot and the skins were taken away and sold.

Unknown Speaker (25:04)

Whilst people who were living in the towns were starving for want of meat.

Dr. Alice Samson (25:07)

So it's Incredibly wasteful and really quite kind of hellish environment when you read these accounts. So there were lots of forms of colonial, I say, domination which significantly impacted and changed the lives of local people. You can. Something I've been thinking about recently is the reaction of local people to things like these large bodied animals such as, you know, large bodied pink mammals who they couldn't communicate with, you know, what actually. And from an indigenous kind of conception, what was the difference between a Spaniard and a pig? They were quite kind of, you know, did they see them as in any way similar? Did they liken them to peccaries which.

Unknown Speaker (25:49)

They would have been familiar with in the Caribbean?

Dr. Alice Samson (25:51)

Were they seen as a completely different type of being? You know, what kind of categories did they put such animals and humans in?

Unknown Speaker (26:00)

So these are some of the questions.

Dr. Alice Samson (26:01)

That I find quite fascinating when thinking about this early period.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (26:07)

And so that we understand the context of your archaeological work, what do we know about the blending of indigenous tradition with Catholicism?

Dr. Alice Samson (26:21)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's. The Caribbean today is one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. And I think a lot of that comes from the, you know, all of the different influences from indigenous religion, Catholicism, African traditions. We can see that in things like voodoo and lots of folk religions across the Caribbean nowadays. We can see that in the persistence of use of underground places like caves where people, you know, still go practice folk religions. We can see that in the curation of indigenous objects such as pestles and mortars and ceramics in, for example, voodoo altars today in places like Haiti. So there's, you know, a great kind of time depth to some of these practices and lots of different influences. And I think that probably in a religion like voodoo, it's. Well, this is often seen as a combination of Catholicism and African religions, but actually there's lots of indigenous components in there too, as people recreated themselves in these new environments.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (29:37)

And can you give me an idea of how religious conversion was enforced?

Dr. Alice Samson (29:43)

I mean, yes, I can. I think it wasn't hugely committed in the Caribbean.

Unknown Speaker (29:51)

What we're talking about is a bunch.

Dr. Alice Samson (29:52)

Of, you know, sailors and Spanish elite who came over and they kind of made a pact with the church and the Crown and said they'd convert people and did it, you know, basically probably.

Unknown Speaker (30:02)

Had mass conversions on beaches, planted across.

Dr. Alice Samson (30:05)

You know, did a few baptisms, recorded it, sent it back for approval.

Unknown Speaker (30:10)

This was not what we see later.

Dr. Alice Samson (30:11)

In Peru and Mexico where you have, you know, the establishment of, you know, missions or the rest of the Spanish Americas, where you have the establishment of.

Unknown Speaker (30:20)

Missions and religious schools and huge numbers.

Dr. Alice Samson (30:23)

Of, you know, priests who were dedicated to the religious education of people. This, I think, in the first couple of decades in the Caribbean, this was a duty rather than a commitment undertaken by those who wanted to get rich quick. So, for example, in the island where I'm working, the Spanish kind of overseer of that island is a guy called Francisco de Barrio Nuevo. And I don't think he was a particularly religious man. He was very into self enrichment. He was an inveterate slave trader. He had a very low opinion of indigenous people. He was used by the Spanish crown to put down all kinds of rebellions across the Caribbean.

Unknown Speaker (30:59)

And he basically saw converting people as.

Dr. Alice Samson (31:01)

A bit of a pain in the neck. So I think that it was very patchily, a patchy undertaking.

Unknown Speaker (31:07)

This doesn't mean that it was received in that way.

Dr. Alice Samson (31:09)

So certainly, you know, again, on Mona, where I work, there's lots of indigenous run churches that crop up quite early on. People convert to Christianity, are probably fascinated with this new religion that they can in some ways, you know, blend with their own understandings or, you know, they're very open and interested in other kind of philosophical and religious positions on the world. And sometimes we can get glimpses of that. I think mostly probably for indigenous people, though, the imposition of Catholicism was not great. It was very bad for them. But I think in terms of the ideas and the philosophies behind it all, I think they were, yeah, certainly interested in it.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (31:47)

So let's talk about your work on Mona. What does the archaeological evidence tell us about the island's pre Columbian history and about the colonization itself?

Dr. Alice Samson (32:01)

So the islands that I currently work on with our collaborators, that's the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and the Department for the Environment and Natural Resources in Puerto Rico. We work with a bunch of Puerto Rican students as well as colleagues and.

Unknown Speaker (32:14)

Students from the uk.

Dr. Alice Samson (32:16)

This is a tiny island that's now uninhabited. It's sat bang in the middle between Dominican Republic and puerto Rico, about 40 miles from each coast. It's in the middle of a very fast sea passage called the Mona Passage. Very deep, fast, flowing waters. Mona is 4 by 5 miles, more or less. So it's a very small lump of limestone that juts out of the middle of the sea. I think the last person to actually permanently live there was a lighthouse keeper back in the day, back in the kind of early 1900s. Now it's predominantly visited by Boy Scouts.

Unknown Speaker (32:53)

By hunters who go and shoot the.

Dr. Alice Samson (32:56)

Goats and pigs that are the descendants of those dropped off by Spanish conquistadors, which is fascinating in itself and loads of scientists who go there to study the endemic flora and fauna and in our case, the archaeology.

Unknown Speaker (33:10)

So nowadays it's a very kind of marginal, dry environment.

Dr. Alice Samson (33:13)

There are no natural sources of water, permanent sources of water on the island. It's quite a forbidding, very hot environment, very sort of thorny vegetation, lots of scrub. The white limestone reflects the sun back at you. It's a very kind of, in many ways, inhospitable place.

Unknown Speaker (33:33)

But we know that 5,000 years ago.

Dr. Alice Samson (33:35)

It attracted people to it who did live there or certainly spent a lot of the year there. And it was quite consistently visited and inhabited by indigenous populations up until the colonial period.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (33:49)

And how would this little island without natural sources of water have been significant strategically in terms of the European settlement of the Caribbean?

Dr. Alice Samson (34:03)

Well, lots of these small islands are often quite strategic in the sense that they can control, you know, control passages and routes. Mona is later on becomes kind of famous and surrounded in pirate myths. So, you know, it's a place where kind of, you know, pirates hid and lived and launched expeditions very conveniently placed between two larger islands to control the kind of and predate upon the trade and traffic. There is probably a focus of the illicit economy throughout the colonial period. In terms of why earlier indigenous populations were interested in the island, I think that, you know, similarly to a lot of the smaller islands in the Caribbean.

Unknown Speaker (34:42)

Which nowadays we would see as the.

Dr. Alice Samson (34:44)

Least attractive places going for the kind of, you know, you go for the bigger places, surely, where you could farm and, you know, there's more space. But I think these earlier populations in.

Unknown Speaker (34:51)

The Caribbean were interested in all kinds.

Dr. Alice Samson (34:52)

Of different resources, so migrating species of birds and turtles. In the case of Mona, the island is tiny, but it has over 200 extensive caves on it. And these caves were places where people really wanted to go and to visit for a variety of purposes that you could characterize as economic and religious and, you know, everything kind of combined. I say that there was no natural.

Unknown Speaker (35:19)

Sources of water on the island, but.

Dr. Alice Samson (35:20)

It'S quite likely that in pre Columbian times, Mona was far wetter. There was forests established forests there, which were then chopped down in later centuries which retained water. There was probably much more water percolating through the caves. And in fact, nowadays one of the only places you can get water from is from the caves. And after it rains, the water kind of percolates down through the caves and collects in pools inside. And certainly at particular times of year, like in the rainy season, there's lots and lots of water on Mona, which now completely drains off. But it was a more hospitable place in the past, there's no doubt about that.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (35:56)

And you mentioned earlier the cave art. So how does this help us when it comes to investigating the early years of colonial settlement from both sides of the colonizers and the native indigenous people?

Dr. Alice Samson (36:12)

Yeah, so as I sort of mentioned, the island has over 200 caves on it. And because it's probably because it's been uninhabited for quite some time and is.

Unknown Speaker (36:22)

Quite inaccessible, that cave art is incredibly well preserved.

Dr. Alice Samson (36:25)

So it's possible that the kind of cave art that we find on Mona. Well, the kind of cave art we find on Mona we find all over the Caribbean, only it's in far greater quantities on Mona, I would say. And we have done quite a lot of kind of research on the cave.

Unknown Speaker (36:44)

Art, trying to work out when some.

Dr. Alice Samson (36:45)

Of it was first made, who was making it. And we have some.

Unknown Speaker (36:49)

Some indications that certainly from around the 13th century there was a kind of.

Dr. Alice Samson (36:53)

Horizon of cave exploration.

Unknown Speaker (36:55)

So several hundred years before the arrival.

Dr. Alice Samson (36:57)

Of Europeans and Africans, people were visiting Mona, probably specifically to go into these caves. There were other sites on the island as well, I should say, including ball courts. So the pre Columbian ball game is perhaps more kind of well known from Mesoamerica, but there are various versions of the ball game that are played throughout.

Unknown Speaker (37:15)

The ancient Americas, all over the Americas.

Dr. Alice Samson (37:17)

From the Amazon to North America to the Caribbean. And we actually have a couple of ball courts in the centre of the island, as well as all this cave art going on inside the caves. This cave art appears in different forms.

Unknown Speaker (37:30)

So we've got the more conventional kind.

Dr. Alice Samson (37:31)

Of charcoal drawings and painted art, but.

Unknown Speaker (37:35)

That is in the minority compared to.

Dr. Alice Samson (37:38)

The cave art that is finger fluted. And what I mean by that is that the cave walls are quite soft, so they're not pecking into hard stone.

Unknown Speaker (37:46)

To make petroglyphs, they're simply drawing their.

Dr. Alice Samson (37:48)

Fingers across the cave walls and it leaves traces behind. So this is what is distinct about the Mona rock art is.

Unknown Speaker (37:56)

Most rock art in the Caribbean is.

Dr. Alice Samson (37:57)

Either petroglyphs on hard stone or pictography.

Unknown Speaker (38:01)

Which is kind of painted or drawn designs.

Dr. Alice Samson (38:03)

Whereas the stuff on Mona is finger fluting. So it's very soft calcium carbonate, bit like the consistency of wet flour that.

Unknown Speaker (38:12)

You can drag your fingers through and.

Dr. Alice Samson (38:13)

Leave designs on the cave walls.

Unknown Speaker (38:15)

And this is why it's so extensive.

Dr. Alice Samson (38:17)

Because it's very easy to mark these cave walls. And we've surveyed now probably between 60.

Unknown Speaker (38:22)

Or 70 caves, and in over half.

Dr. Alice Samson (38:24)

Of those caves we found evidence for this type of rock art, this type of finger fluting. And a lot of our endeavours have been to, as I said before, to work out, you know, how can we date it, who made it? Is it historic? Was it made by, you know, was it made in the 1970s by a.

Unknown Speaker (38:41)

Bunch of boy scouts, which is what.

Dr. Alice Samson (38:42)

A lot of people first said to.

Unknown Speaker (38:43)

Us when we visited Mona.

Dr. Alice Samson (38:44)

Or is it, you know, is it indigenous pre Columbian? And I think that in the majority of cases it is indigenous pre Columbian. It follows A certain set of patterns. It always appears in the obscure, dark zones of the caves in association with sources of water and pools of water.

Unknown Speaker (38:59)

The designs are completely consistent with rock.

Dr. Alice Samson (39:02)

Art that we see across the Caribbean.

Unknown Speaker (39:04)

There's a huge diversity in the designs.

Dr. Alice Samson (39:06)

As well, which kind of indicates that there were many, maybe different communities over.

Unknown Speaker (39:10)

Long periods of time that were visiting these caves and leaving this rock art behind.

Dr. Alice Samson (39:14)

And in one particular cave, and we've published quite a bit on this cave, very conveniently, we have people writing dates and their names on the cave walls from the 16th century. So 16th century Spaniards interacting with this.

Unknown Speaker (39:29)

Indigenous rock art, probably in the presence.

Dr. Alice Samson (39:31)

Of, you know, local indigenous people who took them to these caves to show them these spaces. And the Spanish are interacting in Latin and Spanish on the cave walls and responding to the rock art that they are seeing. Probably not responding to the rock art itself, but responding to everything that was going on in these caves.

Unknown Speaker (39:52)

All the conversations, all the.

Dr. Alice Samson (39:54)

You can only imagine what these caves were used for in terms of the religious rituals, possibly burials, all kinds of things that were going on there. But these caves were certainly very special places in to local people in the Caribbean. And they took the Spaniards there, who interacted with these spaces in a religious way, which indicates that the conversations they were having were about religion, were about their philosophies on the world, were about these kind of, you know, beliefs about the world. These are the kinds of interactions we think were taking place here.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (41:38)

I mean, it's so very exciting that you have got hand prints, the hand marks, the finger fluting of people from hundreds of years ago. I mean, just the fact you can trace those Must be absolutely thrilling. But then to add in inscriptions and dates and written records essentially that you can also read in a different way must be completely astounding. Can you tell me a bit more about how these things relate to each other and what you've learned from them and what you're in the process of deducing?

Dr. Alice Samson (42:14)

Yeah, absolutely. So it's true that when myself and my co director, Jago Cooper, first went to this one particular cave, we were alerted to these inscriptions by a couple of our students who said, I don't.

Unknown Speaker (42:27)

Know, but we think we've seen some 16th century dates on the cave walls.

Dr. Alice Samson (42:30)

It might be worth checking out. Could be graffiti, but, you know, and so we went along and, you know, went back with them. We got scrambled up the cliff face, got into the dark zone of the cave in a series of caverns that we hadn't actually been in before. Suddenly these images opened up before us in the kind of torchlight, in the light of our headlamps and, yeah, our.

Unknown Speaker (42:53)

Hair stood on end.

Dr. Alice Samson (42:54)

It was very clear to us kind of intuitively. Obviously you can't rely on intuition that this was bona fide. And we've, as I said, we've done a lot of work to kind of find evidence for that and we've published that now. But basically, the indigenous rock art is often a series of figures. They're figures, faces, a very kind of predominant iconography, faces, meandering shapes. And these figures are supposed to kind of represent ancestral beings. And next to sort of panels of these drawings are crosses that are placed alongside these drawings.

Unknown Speaker (43:31)

Inscriptions from the Bible, comments in Latin.

Dr. Alice Samson (43:34)

And Spanish and people's names. They're not defacing them, they're not rubbing them out, they're not obliterating them. They are adding to what is already there, which is, I think, the kind of, you know, the fascinating thing for us. And what points to this being, in.

Unknown Speaker (43:49)

A certain sense, a dialogue or a series of conversations that were being had.

Dr. Alice Samson (43:53)

In this space, rather than, you know, a Spanish priest coming in and saying, you know, clear out the pagans and.

Unknown Speaker (43:59)

Clear out the idolaters.

Dr. Alice Samson (44:00)

This was not what is happening here. And that is particularly interesting to us.

Unknown Speaker (44:05)

The inscriptions in Latin and Spanish only.

Dr. Alice Samson (44:07)

Occur in those places where we have the indigenous rock art.

Unknown Speaker (44:11)

And the figure of Jesus is very.

Dr. Alice Samson (44:14)

Prominent in these inscriptions as well, which.

Unknown Speaker (44:17)

Also kind of maybe gives us a.

Dr. Alice Samson (44:19)

Sense of the flavor of these conversations about, you know, the important figures in, you know, respective belief systems, like, you know, in indigenous kind of religion, we would call those kind of culture Heroes or, you know, the sort of prominent figures that these kind of adventuring heroes who presented in various myths that were recorded by Spaniards, particularly Ramon Panay, who Columbus dropped off on his paniola and commissioned him to write a report on indigenous religion.

Unknown Speaker (44:47)

And he did that.

Dr. Alice Samson (44:48)

And so a lot of rock art in the Caribbean is interpreted in light of Panet's document. He identifies various deities and things like this. And of course, that is very useful information, but it doesn't give us an answer to what these things are throughout the entire archipelago and through time. But what we can see is some of the ways in which these Christian visitors are interacting with these drawings and figures. As I've said, sometimes we have citations from the Bible. So there's one particular inscription on a cave wall which is the first mention of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of St. John.

Unknown Speaker (45:22)

Some do not have any parallels. Some are seem to be kind of.

Dr. Alice Samson (45:25)

Spontaneous expressions of awe. So somebody has written next to an extensive patch of indigenous finger fluting and.

Unknown Speaker (45:32)

Designs that cover a whole ceiling.

Dr. Alice Samson (45:34)

Someone has written next to it in Latin, plura facit deus, which I'm informed by Latin scholars means God did many things. So we can think about the context of that.

Unknown Speaker (45:46)

In the 16th century, a Spaniard going.

Dr. Alice Samson (45:48)

Into this cave and saying, God did more things than was ever described in the Bible.

Unknown Speaker (45:53)

Because this is entirely new.

Dr. Alice Samson (45:55)

So you could read it that way. You know, in one sense, it's very brief, but it's a reaction to what.

Unknown Speaker (46:02)

This person was witnessing in this space.

Dr. Alice Samson (46:05)

That they had no previous experience or understanding of.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (46:09)

It's amazing, isn't it, because it gives us an insight, possibly. I'm trying to think if there are any other precedents. I can't think of any unprecedented insight into how European settlers were responding to indigenous spaces and to indigenous expressions of faith and cosmology.

Unknown Speaker (46:35)

Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Alice Samson (46:37)

Absolutely. And, you know, we could think about who some of these Spaniards were. They were, you know, people who were making a new life for themselves and so were, you know, wanted to also discover these new landscapes and make them.

Unknown Speaker (46:50)

Their own kind of homeland as well.

Dr. Alice Samson (46:51)

And so kind of transporting these Christian stories to the Caribbean, you know, and finding that there were these kind of, you know, religious practices and beliefs of the indigenous people as well, and sort of melding those together a bit. Certainly, you know, by this time, we can't rule out the fact that a.

Unknown Speaker (47:10)

Lot of the crosses that have been.

Dr. Alice Samson (47:11)

Drawn in these caves were actually drawn.

Unknown Speaker (47:12)

By indigenous converts who themselves had, you.

Dr. Alice Samson (47:14)

Know, converted to Christianity and may have participated in the Christianization of this space. In fact, we have one quite poignant niche in the cave where we have an indigenous figure drawn who is flanked by two crosses. And you know, it's very tempting to see this as an indigenous Jesus on the cave walls. There's another representation of the Calvary elsewhere.

Unknown Speaker (47:39)

In the cave, which three crosses are.

Dr. Alice Samson (47:41)

Drawn with the name Jesus underneath. So again, you know, Jesus is a prominent figure. They're talking about this story, certainly they're debating this story. Kind of fascinatingly, that indigenous figure has been crossed out probably at a later stage. So people are not necessarily agreeing with each other all the time and having all kinds of conversations about beliefs here.

Unknown Speaker (48:03)

People of different statuses as well.

Dr. Alice Samson (48:04)

So we can imagine maybe the people that drew the crosses, perhaps they were illiterate, they could write their own names.

Unknown Speaker (48:09)

There were also those who could write Latin.

Dr. Alice Samson (48:11)

There's an indication that there was a church official there, there's someone called Canon somebody. And we cannot decipher the rest of the name.

Unknown Speaker (48:18)

It's incredibly frustrating.

Dr. Alice Samson (48:19)

For a while we thought, thought maybe this is even an indigenous person, because we know that on the island of Mona, for example, there's, in one of the Spanish censuses there is an individual who is listed as Juan sacristan. So Juan, who's got a Christian name now, is the sacristant of the church that was established on Mona. So local people are undertaking kind of church positions in this early period too. Now maybe this, you know, who knows who some of these people who are, who have written their names on the cave walls. I mean, maybe the church and cave are kind of interchangeable in a certain sense in this period certainly became a place of Christian cult and visitation quite early on. We also have one individual who's a guy called Francisco Allegre, who fortunately we've been able to trace in the Spanish archives to somebody who emigrated to Puerto Rico with his father in the 1530s and to Rose in the ranks of colonial government and was at certain point in charge of trade between Mona and San Juan. And Francisco Alegre has also written their name in this cave. And so, you know, someone who is quite, quite a kind of high ranking Spanish official is also in this space with indigenous people, with potentially people, church people with sailors who can't write their names, with those who are born, those of European ancestry who were born in the Caribbean themselves.

Unknown Speaker (49:54)

So we shouldn't see in this period.

Dr. Alice Samson (49:56)

That on the one side we have indigenous people, on the other side we have Spaniards. No, there's a great deal more complexity here and I think yeah, we're seeing some of that complexity on the cave walls.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (50:07)

It's wonderful to hear all this, but it really problematizes the story we've had and the one we've told earlier on in this podcast, which is a kind of religious tension, religious subjugation. Instead, there's some sort of cultural dialogue at play. And as you say, the people themselves are not simply divided into one group or another. What do you think this tells us more broadly about interactions between indigenous cultures and colonial forces across the Americas?

Dr. Alice Samson (50:38)

Yeah, that's a really good question. I certainly don't want to give the impression that, you know, this is all kind of rose tinted and, you know, better than we thought. Absolutely. That's not the case. You know, there was a huge amount of exploitation and decimation of indigenous communities. But I do think that this doesn't mean that it's a simple story, and it certainly does not indicate that there is a replacement of indigenous culture by essentially a Spanish and Catholic culture. No, you know, far more complicated and rich history than that. And it's very easy to read the archaeology and the historical texts from that simple perspective. And it's very important, I think, to shift those perspectives and think about all the other, you know, possibilities. All the kind of diverse people that were interacting, their kind of desires and aspirations. Sometimes we have this idea that, you know, the kind of 1492 in the.

Unknown Speaker (51:33)

Colonial encounter, there's an inevitability to it, but.

Dr. Alice Samson (51:36)

But there wasn't an inevitability to it to the people who were living it at the time they were negotiating those moments. And I think that's a very kind of important thing to remember.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (51:47)

To finish then. Do you have a sense of how much remains in modern Caribbean culture of this time of exchange and conflict?

Dr. Alice Samson (52:00)

Ooh, I think that's a really good question. And I would say it's very different from island to island and context to context. Course that there are indigenous communities in.

Unknown Speaker (52:09)

The Caribbean today who have survived and.

Dr. Alice Samson (52:11)

Thrived on islands like Dominica and Trinidad and all over the place. There are those people in the Caribbean who are in the process of rediscovering their, you know, indigenous histories that have long been repressed and quashed through kind of, you know, 500 years of subsequent colonialism. This is something that we absolutely see in Puerto Rico, for example, a lot of, I think Puerto Ricans see this kind of, you know, indigenous or pre Columbian period as the last time that they were unsubjugated and not colonized, you know, first by the Spanish and then the United States now. So I think that people interact very differently with their indigenous kind of past and history. There's a lot of, obviously there's a lot of kind of, you know, persistent kind of folk belief, cuisine, music, religious practices. The Caribbean is so culturally rich because of all these kind of legacies and influences. But I think that the process of kind of colonial violence has meant that those histories and those pasts have often been kind of quashed in favor of the idea that, you know, that it was the Spanish or the European that is the kind of the most important contributor to that cultural diversity, which is.

Unknown Speaker (53:27)

Certainly not the case.

Dr. Alice Samson (53:27)

And of course, there's the African story as well, which is as diverse as, you know, the Europeans and the indigenous kind of communities. They met people coming from very different parts of Africa, certainly in that first period, not in conditions of bondage or slavery at all. And when enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean, obviously right from the get go, the same with indigenous people, there was resistance. And these resistant communities of indigenous and Africans, certainly very strong legacies in places like Jamaica today where there are, you know, communities of maroons still in the Blue Mountains who see themselves absolutely kind of, you know, indigenous, African, Jamaican. So it's very diverse and every island is a different story and different set of politics and different histories.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (54:17)

Well, thank you so much for giving us an insight into this period and into the absolutely thrilling archaeological work that you're doing there. Thank you, Dr. Alice Hampson, for your time.

Dr. Alice Samson (54:30)

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (54:37)

Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit.

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Story Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journey. Journeys with Psoriasis along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.