The oldest residence in the Antilles is located in the Dominican Republic and is 5500 years old

The the oldest residence in the Antilles It dates back to about 5,500 years ago and is located in Samaná, in the northeast Dominican Republicvery close to the archaic ritual burial site he found last year Spanish Dominican archaeologist Adolfo López and your team.

These excavations led by López, director of research at the Guahayona Institute, in collaboration with the Academy of Sciences of the Dominican Republic and the García Arévalo Foundation “completely change the vision of the first inhabitants of the Antilles”.

Faced with the image that was held about them as “less organized groups of nomadic people, we now show that these were human groups settled in places” concrete, the archaeologist explained in statements to EFE.

A month ago, new excavations were completed, which made it possible to find that house in another shelter very close to the first site, and carbon 14 tests determined the age of the remains of several homes of the island’s first settlers. now known as Hispaniola 3500 BC.

Another step towards understanding the settlements in the area

This new discovery will allow us to understand “what was the settlement of the whole area. What we are doing is spatial archaeology, it is not excavating a location and leaving, it is being done over a wide area to understand the movements of these people, where they hunted, where they buried, where they lived, where they gathered food,” he said.

“We are trying to understand – he added – an entire inhabited area that is approximately 5,500 years old, the oldest that has been found in the Dominican Republic (and one of the Antilles). With this excavation, we have located the area where the people who were buried lived” bodies found last year on grave site near the house.

The most interesting thing for an archaeologist is that the conclusions derived from the first find could be verified: yes “they had an area where they lived and another area where they buried their dead”, which gives an idea “about the social complexity these groups had, about their cultural level, which was very high, about the level of their rituals” with death.

These people lived in large huts, supported by shelters (geological rock formations), with a very rich diet, explained López, who is awaiting the arrival of experts from the University of Winnipeg, in Canada, to do some studies. from plant seeds and starch present in grinding artifacts found in excavations.

Its inhabitants, according to the theory of experts and Professor Daniel Shelleythey belonged to the casimiroides group, had a very varied diet and were excellent fishermen, both on the reef and in the open sea, because they moved easily in large canoes.

Were they already farmers?

What remains to be determined, now that it is known that these are groups that settled in a stable place, is whether they were already involved in agriculture, which experts from Canada intend to shed light on if they find arable plants among the remains, it is “most likely” according to at the discretion of the Spanish archaeologist.

Be that as it may, they had “very advanced customs that allowed them to survive in the same place in a very comfortable way”, specifically in the cliff of Cape Samaná, an area where they arrived from the American continent “or from other islands where they landed, but his origin (first) continent,” as DNA studies conducted at Harvard University intend to establish.

López emphasized the importance of these findings: “We are talking about the first inhabitants of the Antilles, we are establishing the origin of the population that currently lives here. It is like finding homo antecessora in Europe”stated as an analogy.

These discoveries are part of the content of the conference that the expert is holding this Thursday in Santo Domingo on the first archaic groups that inhabited the Antilles, all based on the most modern research being carried out.