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Showing posts from December, 2022

Sauteurs Bay: Archaeology in a Disaster Zone

As we wind down the end of 2022, a long-awaited report on Sauteurs Bay is finally ready. Hanna first started this manuscript back in 2018, but there was just more and more to add. There is more still, of course -- we hope to have osteological analysis completed on the site's human burials in 2023, as well as aDNA analysis and more excavations. But there's always more to do. It's been four years and 150 pages now, so time to just get it out there! And one of the core issues addressed is quite urgent. The site (and the communities along Sauteurs Bay) have been suffering from extreme erosion every dry season for the past five years. Homes and businesses have been destroyed as well as one of Grenada's most important archaeological sites, as seen through a continuous stream of human skeletons ripped by the waves into the sea. The archaeological site dates as early as AD 300, but the burials falling into the sea mostly date between AD 900-1200. And of course, this is the vill