Banwari Trace is one of the oldest Pre-Columbian sites in the Caribbean Islands. The site is an Archaic period shellmidden located on the southern side of the island of Trinidad, in the Lesser Antilles. The site is also one of the closest to mainland South America. Excavations at Banwari Trace brought to light different stone tools and the earliest human skeleton found so far in the Caribbean.
Archaeological excavations carried out in the late 1960s revealed remains of both marine and terrestrial fauna like freshwater mollusks, along with pigs, deer, alligators and howler monkeys. The earliest levels of the shellmidden showed that people exploited shellfish and crabs from different environments, such as rivers, swamps and sea coast. These oldest levels were dated through radiocarbon analysis to about 7000 B.P.
Banwari Trace Artifacts
Bone and stone tools included blades, scrapers, grooved axes, projectile points and fragments of serpentine bowl, along with bone tips used on hunting or fishing spears. People were exploiting both coastal and marine resource possibly thanks to the aid of canoes. Material assemblages included stone tools probably used for canoe making, along with fishing and plant processing implements, such as small and large pestles, mortars, and manos.
Banwari Trace Burial
During the 1969 and 1970 excavations, the oldest human skeleton so far discovered in the Caribbean was found at Banwari Trace by Peter Harris and his colleagues of the Trinidad and Tobago Historical Society. The so-called Banwari Man, which according to recent analyses could well be a woman, was buried in a shellmidden in a crouched position, with associated a small pebble and a needlepoint and he was then covered by a layer of shells. Archaeologists date this burial to about 4000 B.C.
The remains of the Banwari burial are now guarded at the University of West Indies Zoology Museum.
More on the Banwari Burial
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to Caribbean, and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Saunders Nicholas J., 2005, The Peoples of the Caribbean. An Encyclopedia of Archaeology and Traditional Culture. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California.
Wilson, Samuel, 2007, The Archaeology of the Caribbean, Cambridge World Archaeology Series. Cambridge University Press, New York.