About
1,000 years ago, there was a thriving village located in the
area now occupied by the Cinnamon Bay Campground. The inhabitants
of that village were Tainos, indigenous Americans whose ancestors
had migrated from South America, and whose culture had spread
to St. John from Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.
For more than 400 years, the Tainos of Cinnamon Bay lived peacefully
as fishers, farmers, gatherers and hunters. Having little need
for great technological advances or to defend themselves from
other human beings, their culture concentrated on religious and
spiritual development.
The spiritual center of their community was a special structure,
called a caney, which housed statues representing the Taino gods
called zemis. The caney was dedicated to ceremony and prayer
and was analogous to the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples
of the modern world. It was in this caney that the villagers
conducted an annual ceremony in which they made offerings of
the first fruits of their harvests to the zemis.
On the day of the ceremony, the cacique, or chief, flanked by
the highest-ranking priests and nobles of the village, would
sit at the entrance to the caney and beat on a ceremonial drum.
The villagers would assemble outside of the caney and sing songs
in praise of the chief's zemis. They then purged themselves by
inserting a ceremonial spatula into their throats to induce vomiting.
Thus cleansed, they would enter the caney carrying ceramic pottery
containing offerings for the zemis. The pottery was made from
sacred clay believed to contain zemis and the spirits of departed
ancestors. The offerings represented the best of the harvest
and included large perfectly formed shellfish and fine specimens
of adult animals.
Once inside the caney, the worshippers would break a hole at
the bottom of the ceramic pot, thus allowing the spirit to depart.
Then the pot with the broken out bottom, along with its contained
offerings, would be placed on the dirt floor of the caney. The
ceremony ended with singing and dancing and the distribution
of food by the chief and the priests. The offerings in the caney
would be left to rot and remain undisturbed until the next year
when the ceremony would be repeated and new offerings and pottery
would be placed on top of what remained of the old ones.
Sometime around the era of Christopher Columbus, the Taino vanished
from St. John. Their exact fate remains a mystery. They may have
been wiped out, enslaved, or forced to flee with the arrival
of warlike Caribs to the area sometime before the arrival of
Columbus, or they might have met a similar fate at the hands
of Spanish invaders following in the footsteps of Columbus. (Columbus,
who sailed past the north coast of St. John in 1493, did not
report seeing any signs of human habitation on the island.) At
any rate, for the next 200 years, the crumbling remains of the
abandoned village were covered over by natural vegetation and
windblown sand from the nearby beach.
When the Danes colonized St. John in the early 1700s, they established
a plantation at Cinnamon Bay. They cleared and terraced the land,
planted crops and constructed buildings scattering and discarding
what little remained of the ancient village. The area once occupied
by the Taino caney was covered over by a road built to connect
the north shore plantations with the main Danish settlement in
Coral Bay.
The plantation at Cinnamon Bay went through its own cycle of
development, prosperity and decline. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the profitability of colonial plantation agriculture
had degenerated to a point that the grand sugar and cotton estates
of St. John were sold or abandoned. Cinnamon Bay was no exception,
and during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
emphasis shifted to the more humble endeavors of bay
rum production,
cattle raising and subsistence farming.
By the time Cinnamon Bay became the domain of the National Park
in 1954, even the old plantation road had reverted to bush. The
Taino village and its holy caney appeared to have been erased
from the face of the Earth and from the memory of man.
That is, until 1992, when National Park archeologist, Ken Wild,
sunk a two-meter square test hole on this very same spot where
an ancient Taino community had congregated long ago to worship
their gods.
The
archeological excavation that followed this discovery uncovered
layer upon layer of the Taino’s offerings to their gods
and marked the first time in the history of Caribbean archeology
that a caney had been excavated with the associated offerings
still in place. Carbon dating of these artifacts show that the
ceremony of annual offerings had been occurring from approximately
1000 A.D. to about the time that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean
in 1492.
Fortunately, this archeologically significant excavation was
begun before the forces of nature intervened to make it impossible.
The beach at Cinnamon Bay has been eroding at an alarming rate.
Just 40 years ago, the beach extended about 250 feet further
out to sea than it is now. Hurricanes Hugo, Luis, Marilyn and
others have accelerated the process and the caney, now lying
just a few yards from the shoreline, would soon have been washed
away and lost forever.
