Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1988 - 44

size -almost as large as the extinct
aurochs, forerunner of domestic cattle.
Free of predators, except for humans,
and having neither disease nor grazing
competitors to contend with, the cattle
inhabited a kind of bovine utopia and
provided the colonists with a ready
supply of both meat and hides.
Nonetheless, Puerto Real continued
to flourish as an international smuggler's haven -a fact that constitutes a
kind of historical irony. For the Spanish
mercantile system of the sixteenth
century was very legalistic in nature,
and Spain had decreed that all commerce with the colonies had to be
routed through the city of Seville. But
as the Spanish empire grew, Seville became hard pressed to supply the farflung outposts with what they needed.
In addition, the Spanish instituted a
counter-piracy convoy system in 1542
to protect the gold and silver coming
from Mexico and Peru. All such treasure ships were required to sail in convoy and visit only ports on the convoy's
route. Puerto Real was located well
away from the Carrera de las Indias, as
the convoy route was called. But in
truth, the government of Spain cared
little about the colonies, and was
mainlyintent on seeing that New World
shipments of gold and silver bullion
continued to arrive.
But the colonists' attitude toward
Spain was, in effect, "we obey, but don't
comply."They willfullyignored much of
the legislation that the Spanish government handed down in an effort to control trade. The government knew perfectly well that not all of its enactments
would be heeded, but hoped that most
would.
The people of Puerto Real, then,
had real economic incentives for
cooperating with the rescate: it was
their only means of securing the barest
necessities, and through it they could
often acquire superior European goods
at a cost lower than that of similar
Spanish items.
But there was another, more pressing reason why they participated in the
rescate: the smugglers were not above
transacting business at gunpoint, and
often threatened to burn and sack
Puerto Real if its citizens refused to
cooperate. Indeed, in 1566 the French
pirate Jean Bontemps, known to the
Spanish as Juan del Buen Tiempo, did
sack the town and burn some of its
buildings in reprisal on just such
grounds. Later, in the seventeenth
century, Caribbean pirates would be44

Archaeology

siege Spanish towns while their citizens fled into the countryside, and then
hold the towns for ransom.
The archaeological evidence to support these colorful stories remained
unknown until 1974, when the site of
Puerto Real was discovered by a remarkable resident of Haiti, William
Hodges (see page 47).
Hodges and M. Albert Mangones, a
representative of the Haitian government, contacted Charles Fairbanks at
the University of Florida in Gainesville,
and Fairbanks, together with his student Ray Willis, succeeded in putting
together a project to conduct fieldwork
in Haiti. Four seasons of preliminary
fieldwork and excavation followed at
Puerto Real from 1979 through 1982,
to be followed by three additional seasons which saw concurrent work at
Puerto Real and at the nearby site of
Columbus's old settlement, La Navidad. Workat La Navidad continued into
the 1986 season, but had to be broken
off because of political unrest in Haiti.
What emerged from all this work
was a picture of a settlement roughly
500 yards square in size. It contained a
town square with a probable cathedral
and administrative building, and a total

of 57 structures, many of them houses
built of stone, brick and wood. The site
gave evidence of considerable wealth,
and yielded some of the oldest porcelain ever found in the New Wbrld.
Moreover, the site seemed little disturbed by any post-abandonment activity: the Haitians living on the site
practice hoe agriculture, and so they
had disturbed only the top five inches
or so of the soil. Puerto Real, then,
was a sealed time capsule, a pristine
archaeological record of one of the
earliest European settlements in the
New World.
Of the 57 structures found at the site,
only five have been excavated: two public buildings on the town square, two
upper-class residences, and a lowerclass commercial-residential area. The
author's work has focused primarily
on an upper-class residence called Locus 19, which had an attached walled
courtyard.
Originally discovered during a sitewide subsurface survey in 1982, Locus
19 gave immediate evidence of being a
high-status residence occupied primarily during the second half of the sixteenth century. A more intensive examination of Locus 19 during the 1984

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1988

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1988