broken pieces of pottery
things like that
There's a good
that's a real typical - what -
it's piece of a broken bowl
about like that
typical of what a Taino pot might look like
find tons of broken stuff like that
That's a big [unknown] you're seeing it in cross-section
round and there you can see it head on
griddle for baking antioch bread
which is the Taino staple food
conch shell pick for working wood
little stone net weight for sinking 
a fish net
Again, you know, 
it's not gold and rubies
as big as basketballs 
but it's the kind of stuff that we need
to tell us what we want to know.
Thanks to all the students who worked
on this. None of this happens without our students
both the -
both from the United States and from the Dominican
Republic, Gloria.
Once you dig this stuff up, you analyze it
in various ways to get at what you're after.
One of the things we're doing is ancient DNA
analysis which will tell us something about
the blending
of Taino, European
and African populations
in the birth of the Carribean and the birth 
of the Americas if you will.
Also give us information on diseases which
is something that
some people say, well, you know
fifty years after the
Spanish came the Tainos were all dead
mostly of disease.
Don't know if that's true so we're looking
into it.
We analyze the chemical composition of
of pottery
to tell us something about
where the clay is coming from -
patterns of distribution, manufacture
and trade. These are all
laboratory analyses that are done
after the fact.
Absorbed residue and this is Jay Vandervean,
my former grad student who is now assistant
professor of anthropology at IU
Southbend.
At El Tamarino, which from to
the naked eye is a purely prehistoric site,
there is no Spanish colonial material on the
surface.
You don't see broken pieces of magellica [sp?]
pottery or glass pieces or anything like that
but when Jay analyzes -
he started analyzing the ceramics and the
residue
that were absorbed from the foods that
were cooked in them
he was finding all kinds of stuff - the evidence
of the use of plant and animal species that
were introduced by the Spanish.
So the real interaction
may have been in foodstuffs and not what I
was looking for -
broken Spanish pottery and trade
beads and stuff.
That makes my job a lot more difficult
because it means I can't tell from the surface
whether a site
is of the right age or not
but it makes it more interesting so I'm happy
it happened.
The other thing that we're doing
is
looking for
up to six ship wrecks
from hurricanes that struck Isabella
Bay in 1495
and I'm mentioned this - this is
what you'll be hearing
for the underwater work you'll be
hearing about shortly
but it was in the context of this
work that Captain Kidd came down the pike
because,
well, we had a very successful underwater
season in the summer of 2006
in 2007
unseasonable rains,
heavy rains, filled the bay up with silt and
it was impossible to work
but the ultimate goal here is to find
one or more Columbus era wrecks
and turn them into,
ultimately, into underwater preserves, under
water parks,
as we have done successfully
in the southeastern part of the country and
these are just
for me to finish with
a few slides
of
an underwater preserve
back in the southeastern part of the country
and it's getting us back to the part of the
country
where we're going to
encounter Captain Kidd and the golden age
of piracy which I know is what you are all 
really here to hear about.
Thank you for coming on this awful day and
for
for listening to a few words about 
the Taino.
[applause]
What we're going to do is 
show a
small TV segment from CNN and WISH TV
and then I'll pick up with a little 
Powerpoint here. [Video plays]
Pirates of the Carribean is the stuff that movies
are made of but at Indiana University it
is the real thing. An Indiana University underwater
archaeology team is confident that it's found
Captain Kidd's last pirate ship off the coast
of the Dominican Republic. Captain Kidd was
one of the most notorious pirates of the
late 17th century. Today
the IU team's leader spoke exclusively with
24 Hour News 8's Leslie Olson about
this historic discovery - Leslie.
For twenty years Charles Beeker and his students
have been researching historic shipwrecks
but this discovery could put IU on the
international treasure map.
It's absolutely amazing. I think every 
kid at some point
dreams of pirates and cannons
and discovering something like this and 
then to
actually be able to jump in the water and go this is it.
This is really it. Indiana University graduate student
Nicole Wiegand is thrilled to be part of
an underwater science team that could go down
in history
as identifying the 1699 wreck
of Captain Kidd's final ship,
the Quedagh Merchant.
The whole midpart of the ship has come out and
so we're going to look for the remnants along the rock.
IU's Underwater Science Director Charles Beeker says
the Dominican Republic government recently asked him
to check out a possible underwater cannon
seen by one of its residents. He was in the
area doing other research.
Today we've got a pristine untouched
shipwreck that
in all my years of diving as an archaeologist
and before that
attempting to prove without question
that it was Captain Kidd's.
It's believed he buried much of the
gold and silver and other valuables
before he abandoned the ship
and it was burned.
That treasure has never been found.
Beeker won't be surprised, however,
to find very many valuable artifacts
under the wreck in the months to come.
Leslie Olson - 24 Hour
News 8
Okay. If you haven't had a chance to be on 
CNN Live I don't really recommend it. 
It's quite a trip.
What I'd like to do now is bring you
through a little story
of how this really came about.
As Jeff said, we were working in La
Isabella
doing our normal Taino and, hopefully, Columbus
work but we were weathered out, so we packed
up and moved down to the east area
where Francis Soto and the government had asked
us to look at a series of cannons and these cannons 
were described as
maybe a high dynamic wrecking site because
all the cannons were parallel in very
shallow water
so we're trying to envision these deployed cannons
how it might wreck and tumble 
to make everything kind of line up together.
Entering the water first in June of last
summer
we immediately saw cannons in very shallow
water and
I won't go through the diagnostic features
but they matched the 
the right time period that we're talking with
low trunions [sp?] and
we'll bring some up later for
positive identification
but the lone cannons were quite remarkable
because in most places in Florida, for instance,
the cannons were all gone. These are very
quickly picked up by treasure hunters
or hobby collectors, looters that were
going to sites
from the 1960's on up.
We also noted, rather remarkably, a series
of anchors protruding in. 
You need the eye here, but this is 
a fluke of an anchor,
the palm and the fluke and there's a cannon laying
on top it with a second cannon and the third cannon.
That's very unusual to have anchors 
underneath the cannons.
I've seen many a shipwreck with anchors
on top of cannons as spare anchors
the Spanish would typically sail with as many
as seven anchors -
two for deployment
five more in reserve
so they put them down in the cargo hold 
and pick them up and use them as necessary
but why the achors were underneath the 
cannons was somewhat of a mystery to us.
There are hot spots working with the government.
Francis Soto came with metal detectors 
and we noted
kind of a rubble area next to the
pile here
but these are hot areas that after 300
and some years
we've got encrusted coral and
cover over possible more artifactual material.
Francis' boss, good
colleauge, friend of ours, Pedro Barrel also came
with Mario, a professional photographer.
And we got back in the boat afterwards and we 
started discussing the dynamics of this site
and what really to me was striking
was the fact that what we actually had was
a pile of cannons
and it's difficult in the picture without
the right eye, but everyone of those lead
weights is on a separate cannon.
So we started numbering the cannons. 
Some of the graduate students, Fritz here,
went along and
assisted.
I believe no one maybe here in the audience
that also assisted with us.
We'll introduce some people later.
We had these cannons that were piled up
in a fairly high - 2 meter high pile
that was really indicative of an orientation
of stacking. Then
what we have and these are my field notes in
the boat. I'm not normally this shakey 
trying to take my notes but you note the drawing
the coral's growing but the cannons, muzzel, the
cascavelle, muzzle, cascavelle, opposite directions 
some protruding out, some underneath
anchors coming out from underneath
three minimum
perhaps - we intend - we figure we'll
find more
what we think happened and we begin to 
summize is possibly
these cannons, as a matter of fact, I'm sure
