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Carlton in the Dominican Republic - Ep 157
2.9k Plays1 year ago
In this is episode of Ruins, Connor and David talk with Carlton about his experience in the Dominican Republic. Carlton is currently in the DR working with a dive team researching a 16th century shipwreck in the Caribbean. He talks about the good and the bad, but mostly the fascinating.
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/157
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Transcript
Introduction and Previous Episode Recap
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:25
Speaker
There we go. Okay. Childish. We just have to listeners right there. Anyway, Carlton is in the Dominican Republic currently, or as I like to call it Puerto Rico. That was quoting Donald Trump. Anyway, and before we introduce Carlton, I'm going to say Connor, do you have an addendum to last week's episode?
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, we kind of fucked up. We fucked up the order of the national register eligibility. Thank you for all those people told us that we were wrong and dumb. We really appreciate that stuff. So read the bulletin. Don't listen to us. Don't send that episode to your friends unless they want to quote things incorrectly. But we were incorrect. Thank you for telling us we were dumb. Please do that every time that happens.
Meet Dr. Carlton in the Dominican Republic
00:01:10
Speaker
What's up? Do you know what the correct answers are? No. I can't off the top of my head either. Actually, we pulled up in Slack. Chris, bear with me a second. You even sent it to us. So I know you're going to shit yourself if we don't do it. As rightfully so. I would also shit myself if I had just sent this to somebody and they still didn't know it. You're a good man. Okay. Okay. So, uh, national register criteria A is action events.
00:01:36
Speaker
B is body, people, important, et cetera. C is craftsmanship and then D is data. So that's your, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those are your easy thing. Action, body, craftsmanship, data. Remember that ABCD. Yes, sir. All right. Carlton, Dr. Excuse me. Newly defended actual Dr.
Challenges and Logistics of Underwater Fieldwork
00:01:58
Speaker
Carlton shield chief gover Esquire extraordinaire. How you doing?
00:02:04
Speaker
I'm fucking tired. That's how I am. I'm fucking exhausted. It has been a long 10 days and I still have a week more. Yeah, it's a good time, but it's a lot of work. It is way more work than I thought it was going to be. Like data wise, like mentally wise or physically wise? It's like all of that.
00:02:32
Speaker
I mean when ultimately we're maybe getting in about like two and a half hours worth of actual data collection fieldwork a day right because we're doing like two tank dives and depending on your air consumption you can be down there anywhere from like 45 minutes to an hour depending on depth. So the shower you are the more air you're going to be able to have
00:02:54
Speaker
Whereas the deeper you are, the more oxygen you absorb because the under pressure oxygen compresses. However, like the whole, this field school is nuts for a number of reasons. One, it's the Indiana University Underwater Science Field School. It's an interdisciplinary project that has archaeologists, marine biologists, earth and atmospheric scientists, and animal behaviorists.
00:03:19
Speaker
So there's like anywhere from like three to four teams in the water doing different shit at the same site. And like, so for the archeology, right now we're doing impact assessments for the Dominican government. So we're going to these sites, these living museums in the sea and monitoring if objects are being displaced or what the fuck's happening. And it's kind of like part of it's a shit show. First day we got out there,
00:03:47
Speaker
These living museums are supposed to have these historic marker buoys. They're supposed to have safety buoys that keep oncoming traffic the fuck away from the site so you're not killing scuba divers. Gone. No one knows where they are. The resort's not putting them up. The Dominican government's not putting them back up. So we had to spend like one day just doing site maintenance to make sure that we were safe. Because some of those boats are scooting in on top of our divers. Not okay in the slightest.
00:04:14
Speaker
But it's like the daily process is breakfast starts at seven, you have 30 minutes to eat, then we have morning meeting where we go over what the fuck we're supposed to do. Because like every day, it's a new thing based on what happened yesterday.
00:04:29
Speaker
We take all of our equipment, we put it in the trucks, take the trucks down to scuba fun. Then we load up all the fucking oxygen tanks, so there's about 21 of us, so that means 42 tanks. Load those up in advance, including all of our dive equipment, all of the water. Get that on the fucking boat.
00:04:47
Speaker
everything's on the fucking boat. Then we've got to drive to the site and it depends on where the fuck we're going. And then while that's going on, we're all trying to get ready, putting on our wetsuits, getting over all the equipment set up. Then we got to send divers in the water. Our master divers basically get the right mooring set up so we have the right guideline to get us on the site. Because day one, gentlemen, let me tell you about the shit show with the Guadalupe archaeological preserve was visibility about four feet.
00:05:14
Speaker
It was turbulent down there. So it's about 25 feet down. You can't see shit. We were all wandering. Like we all burnt through the first tank because no one could find the fucking site and we dropped it right next to it. We all scattered and couldn't find it.
00:05:30
Speaker
And of course, like you're panicking and you don't realize like how fast you're going through oxygen or what's going on in a normal situation.
Interdisciplinary Project Insights and Marine Life
00:05:36
Speaker
What you should do if you can't find the site after five minutes, come up, talk to the boat, right? And the boat will direct you. Nobody did that. Everyone went through all their oxygen and it just popped up where they ran out of oxygen, right? And some people fucking all over the ocean.
00:05:55
Speaker
What the fuck is going on? He's like Marcel Kornfeld. It's a very similar vibe. Except when all of the students are on the ground digging in dirt, they're all floating astray in the fucking floor. Of course he's going to be upset.
00:06:12
Speaker
And so we were able to find the site, so the second dive, we were able to get down there and actually do some assessments. For the archaeologists, for this first half, which I'll get to in a bit, we're just basically looking at anchors and cannons, making sure that they're oriented the right way and then what their inclination is, because we're trying to see what the fuck's happening. And what is happening is because these morning boobies keep getting lost or cut by somebody.
00:06:38
Speaker
people are tying their mooring lines to the fucking cannons. So then the cannons are going to drug around the sea floor because these boats are just pulling them, and it's destroying coral. So that's where this interdisciplinary nature is coming in. There's some very endangered corals that love the iron on these things. We're watching those. Then we have the marine biologists watching these sergeant major fish that make their nests on straight walls. And these things will fucking attack you.
00:07:07
Speaker
I'm trying to get this inclination why I have this fish literally biting my face and coming after me, and the fucker's only this big, but they're aggressive. They just got to watch out. We have a lot of eels at the site and then these lionfish that are invasive and they're extremely venomous. There's no sharks in this part of the DR.
Exploring the Captain Kidd Site
00:07:27
Speaker
We're in the Southeast tip. We're in the Caribbean, but as I'll talk about later, the rest of the project, we're going to be on the Atlantic site.
00:07:34
Speaker
There be sharks, which are fine, but we've kind of gone to a number of sites. So like we did the Guadalupe, called the Guap, Archaeological Reserve, that's right off the coast here where I'm at now at Viva. We did the Captain Kidd site the second day, which was a blast. So what happened was is when Captain Kidd found out that he had been, he's not really a pirate, he's a privateer, but when he found out he was being accused of piracy, he was basically like,
00:08:03
Speaker
He's the only pirate that is known to have ever buried treasure, like offloaded his treasure, sent to ship a fire, and he went to New England where he was eventually hung twice. Captain Kidd is a phenomenal sight for two reasons. One, treasure hunters couldn't find it because they looked at the documents, they knew where the ship was burnt, and they thought it was
00:08:21
Speaker
fell there, but our project lead, Professor Charlie Beaker, he went to England and looked at documents and there was a Dutch narrative that watched the burning ship basically leave this river tributary and float to Catalina Island and that's where it sunk. So we were able to find it a couple years ago.
00:08:37
Speaker
And so it's completely preserved. Treasure hunters haven't hit it. And that's pretty critical in this country, where there's not a single archaeology program, a single museum creation program. There's only a handful of archaeologists, most of which are Cuban. So all the cultural material that has come out of the ocean in this country is through treasure hunters. And through these treasure hunter agreements, there are 50-50 splits between the treasure hunters that have been in government. So I've looked at site plans by these treasure hunters. They're fucking garbage.
00:09:07
Speaker
throwing a coral, like their job, like all their focus on is getting things out to sell. But Captain Kidd wasn't that way. I wasn't able to do as much work at Kidd because while I'm here also being a professor and helping these like run things, I'm also trying to get my scientific diving certificate. So the Captain Kidd site has this wall that goes down 100 feet. So that's where I did my deep dive. So while everyone else is kind of doing that, I got to go
00:09:33
Speaker
go down this fucking sheer face coral 100 feet down in this crystal clear water where I could see the top. It was easily the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. I was only down there, like the whole dive itself was 20 minutes and our bottom time was five at the depth. But there was this gorgeous very rare corals that are extraordinarily expensive down there that I got to see. And then it kind of came up and that was a one tank dive. It was a 20 mile boat ride. So it was like an hour and a half to get
Underwater Archaeology Techniques
00:10:01
Speaker
there.
00:10:01
Speaker
And so what I did, I had, so we had, and the site's precarious because it's, it's the current is hitting it up against reef. There aren't many beaches here, like this environment, the Dominican Republic was very similar to the Yucatan. It's a karst environment, lots of limestone, not natural beaches. So we had like two students like on the reef ledge, they have walking talkies trying to direct students
00:10:22
Speaker
in this really choppy water. We were coming up because after 100 feet, you have to do a safety stop at around 15 feet. Me and my dive buddy who led me, we just kind of went and checked out the cannons, the dirt safety stop, just kind of serving the archaeology. But like that, the current was bad. And you had to be very careful because students were getting slammed into reefs, slammed into corals. It was precarious. It's dangerous.
00:10:46
Speaker
But it was gorgeous, gorgeous there. So once I took my stuff off, I was just helping students direct because our main project there were these palmata corals that students were trying to find and do photogrammetry. So what we did at Captain Kidd mostly is we photogrammetry the entire site to develop a GIS model to see where everything is because that's the best way you can get any information out of underwater arc.
00:11:09
Speaker
You can't really take measurements. So you have to just do photogrammetry and just fucking map an entire site. And that's how you're going to find your artifact distributions and look at differences in how things have changed relatively. It's a really different world. And you have to think very differently about these things. And it's not like at a field school or at an active project where you come into something you don't know, you could just say, hey, what's going on?
00:11:35
Speaker
and you can trek from there, it's like you can't talk underwater and you have a limited time that you're there and so like you are trying to, it is just high speed all the time and we knew we weren't going back to kit and that was the only day we were there.
00:11:49
Speaker
So you're really given the small window to do all this stuff. And like you mentioned at our previous episode, which I think was like 150, 151, you said that even in the pools, the communication is terrible and you're trying to orient yourself just exponentially worse in that real life, right? Yeah, absolutely. I've gotten really comfortable where I don't know anything. If something's happening, I'm not wasting oxygen. We're going up to the surface. I'm gonna communicate with the boat and we're gonna go back down because I've heard enough of our
00:12:18
Speaker
project director being like, why won't students just come up and let's figure this out? Cause they start kind of freaking out down below and trying to figure it out themselves. I'm like, fuck that. I don't know what's going on here. I'm going up to get this man that's been doing this since the fucking seventies. He'll tell me what to do and get down there and move forward. So I have no problem.
00:12:36
Speaker
to just go up? No, not at all. Because some of these places, we're not going below 30 feet, really, where there's these mandatory safety stops, especially the guap that's maybe 15 to 20 feet. I can just pop up real quick. You deflate your BCD, you come up, I just signal to the boat, I'll just kick over. And then, yeah, there's a little bit of oxygen consumption on the way to get my trim back in line. So once I get back under the water, I need to balance myself to make sure I'm not going up or down too much. So there's also a lot of
00:13:06
Speaker
oxygen management myself. So like my first couple of dives, I was only down there for like 30 minutes because I was not accustomed to that kind of work. But like now I'm able to get a dive down for an hour because I'm like, I have to actively think about my breathing all the time. Like I have a little note on my data slate that's like, like slow, deep breaths.
00:13:25
Speaker
And that's also helped me maintain my buoyancy a lot better underwater. So I'm able to hover a lot easier now and get that work done. You said obesity? Oh, obesity. That's the vest you wear that has her scuba tank attached to it. It has her regulators. It has her dive computers at times. And you said to deflate it, does it suck water? Yeah. So this is what Jacques Cousteau invented, this whole scuba system. So it will actually inflate and deflate with air.
00:13:56
Speaker
to help manage your buoyancy. And then also when you're at the surface, you can just inflate it and it basically acts like a life vest. So you can just sit there and just fucking backstroke your way to the boat without much effort. So we'll keep you up. So usually when you jump into the water, when you first go in, your obesity is a little inflated. So that way when you hit the water, you'll just come up because you just don't want to sink. Yeah. Yeah. And that takes oxygen out of your actual tank and that's how it's connected. Okay. Yeah. So there's little air heroes that's connected directly to it. Yeah.
00:14:24
Speaker
You want to use that sparingly if possible, right? Because you want to preserve the oxygen and get as much time below as possible. Yeah. And there's also a manual inflate thing. So rather, I'm getting better at not having to use the buttons that will take the oxygen directly in. Since I'm already breathing oxygen, I'm getting better at just manually inflating it so I don't have to drain too much.
Living Museums and Cultural Importance
00:14:44
Speaker
Because at this point now, I think I have over 450 minutes underwater at this point through this project.
00:14:51
Speaker
So I've gotten like much better. And like a lot of the students, it's kind of been funny because they're like, he has the highest amount of archeological training, but the least amount of being underwater. So like a lot of the students were helping me to like figure my shit out while I'm trying to like, I'm sitting there like floating around, like trying to tell him how to take measurements. And it was hard for me like, fucking turning upside down on accident. Like just the way the air will fit in a vest that, you know,
00:15:17
Speaker
Because I mean, you know how it works that way. So like a lot of times we're angles or heads are down. So our fins aren't kicking up sediment in the back. So all that oxygen is in your back. And then when you try to like orient yourself or you move in a certain way, those oxygen bubbles will move in your vest.
00:15:35
Speaker
Do you use like a Trimble to map like to get a datum or do you drop it down from a boat or like, or does it just an arbitrary around the site? Arbitrary around the site. So like you can't really get good GPS coordinates. We had a student the other day, he got an app on his phone and got like one of those waterproof protectors and he was just snorkeling above and like trying to get.
00:15:54
Speaker
data. But the other issue is the way that water refractions work, distances are a little fucky wucky, and then just trying to get a straight line in a current is just difficult. So that's why we do the photogrammetry. And since we're pretty close to shore, you can map those onto Google Maps and GIS coral plots. So NOAA has done a lot of reef and shoreline data, so we're able to map it that way. And you have known tie points or known locations that you can ultimately tie it all together.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah. And so like all the sites that we work on, the purpose of this project is these living museums at the sea. So these are protected sites. And what that introduces them to the local tourist economies, they also become these scuba zones. So all across by eBay, there's Indiana University pamphlets of all the living museums and they're actively like dive, the five dive shops in town are like, we're going to go check out this living museum done by the Americans and see these candles. Like there's fucking plaques down there.
00:16:51
Speaker
that have the name of the ship and everything like that. And when it sank and it's all in Spanish, I can't fucking read it. But it's not just this random collection of cannons that we're the ones that know about it. We're actively making these living parks to save them, one from the treasure hunters, but two to stimulate local economy and interest into these locations.
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Speaker
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Interest in Taino Culture
00:19:02
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 157 of Life and Ruins podcast. I'm here with Carlton and Connor. We're reminiscing about Carlton's, or Carlton's reminiscing. Not even reminiscing. He's telling us the active play-by-play of what's going on in his school. But in the interim, we were talking about Carlton's fascination with where he's at now and that he might possibly want to just become a C person. But we talked about the Taino. Can you tell us about the Taino? I've met a Taino.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah. What's really attracted me to this project is, as I mentioned in the first segment, just the general lack of archaeology that's being conducted here. The second is really how the Caribbean is really the American Mediterranean. There's a lot of interaction going on between the American Southeast
00:19:47
Speaker
I like that phrase. That's a cool way to put it. Yeah. There's a lot of interaction between the American Southeast, Central America, particularly the Maya, and then also Northern South America. They are all contributing into this melting pot of culture and trade in the Caribbean, centering from the Bahamas, the Keys, down to the Western Antilles, and the Greater Antilles, and the Greater Antilles being Cuba, Dominican, Haiti, and so forth, and Puerto Rico.
00:20:14
Speaker
There's this really interesting influx of cultures and traditions, but the Taíno are so poorly understood. This is this catch-all term for indigenous people to the Caribbean that were all but annihilated by the Spanish. I got to do a cave dive a couple days ago, where we went to one of these freshwater, basically a cenote.
00:20:35
Speaker
And the cenote itself used to be a dry cave. And we know that through the presence of stalagmites and stalactites, which only form in a dry cave environment in which water is trickling down, leaving the calcium carbonate behind and creating those jaws of a cave. And it's completely flooded. But what's in there? There's fucking hearths in there. There's tiny little pottery in there. There's fucking dead sloths in there. Once you're able to go around this, like,
00:21:02
Speaker
really frozen period of time that was just incredible. There's cave art and rock art that is present, both through
00:21:14
Speaker
ochre, red paint, as well as pictographs and pictograms. There's a lot of early documentation of the Taino with the Spanish. The majority of Taino culture history is just through ceramics. That's just been the focus of these really old school typologies. That's how people have thought about replacement and
00:21:36
Speaker
in the Caribbean. And I've been reading up on the literature and that's changing where it's like, no, pots aren't fucking people, but it's like, this is another one of those geographical qualities that suffers from a huge lack of archeologists and also one of the larger islands, which had Taino, you know, it was fucking blockaded, still embargoed. And they don't like to talk to the Americans very much.
00:21:56
Speaker
There's this general lack of data transference. That's what's gotten me is not only looking at the Taino history that's really the first people interact with Western Europeans, but then also there is this cultural reawakening of Taino across the Caribbean where more people are reconnecting with their Taino identity and their actual Taino remnant populations in the mountains.
00:22:21
Speaker
So the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi is actually here in the Dominican Republic. And so there are these massive mountain ranges here in the country that have preserved Taino people and ways of life that are still rather hesitant. In North America? No, east of the Mississippi. Like even in South America? Oh, east of... Okay. Yeah. So the mountain ranges here are part of the Appalachians, the Appalachian formation, if that makes sense.
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah. So as you're, as you're diving into this stuff, are you finding that this catch all term or I guess at the time of contact where all these groups kind of homogenous and all these different islands, or is the tie, you know, it's just a catch all term describe indigenous Caribbean cultures without recognizing kind of the individuality of the each separate kind of location. Yeah. So it's definitely the latter even here on Hispaniola. We know that there's at least four major groups.
00:23:13
Speaker
But we really don't know the boundaries between these groups or what the difference is. A lot of it's once again based on the pottery, but there's just, you know, just don't know like the Spanish systematically wiped out these people, especially here in the DR in Haiti. Like they wanted them gone because they weren't playing ball. Puerto Rico, there's more known about Puerto Rican Taino than kind of the rest of them. But like a lot of people here in the DR in Haiti, right, they're mostly
00:23:40
Speaker
they look at their cultural roots primarily. In Haiti, it's going to be more African, the enslaved ancestry. And then TR, they really kind of push that Spanish background. So there's like a really stark difference between the Haitian and Dominican populations. And a lot of that deals with the colonial roots and the countries being set up. You know, like the independence in the Dominican Republic isn't the day they got independence from Spain, but when they got independence from Haiti. That's wild.
00:24:06
Speaker
There's a fascinating video a couple months ago. It's about ancient Americas on YouTube. Great channel. He does really good research. I think he's an archaeologist, but it's a peopling of the Caribbean. And because there's so little evidence of like pot or like anything remaining and the genetics are just literally a melting pot of all the entire world, like even Indian people that live there, like subcontinental Indian people.
00:24:30
Speaker
It's hard to tell where the migrations came from. So they're like, did they come from Florida to Cuba and then down, but some of the genetics point to maybe from Brazil and Columbia up to Puerto Rico and then maybe back down. And it's like all over the place. But like, like Carlton saying, everybody that lives in the greater and the lesser Antilles or even Curaçao has like, like Spanish DNA, but they have everything else. So they don't know.
00:24:54
Speaker
And like, I know a lot of poor people in New York that say like, I'm Taino, but I'm like, you're, you know, I can't tell them like, you look European to me, but yeah. Yeah. So the main narrative is that people came up to Lester Antilles through South America first. And then there's like a Western way of coming in from the Maya. And there's like a lot of iconographic and
00:25:14
Speaker
ceremonial similarity between the Spanish contact Taino and the Maya, the Cenotes, and a lot of those things are pretty prevalent. Then there's not much evidence for interaction or peopling from South America or from the southern United States like Florida. I just don't buy that. People say, well, people only lived in the Caribbean for the past 5,000 years. That's bullshit.
00:25:37
Speaker
People got to possibly Monteverde, but we know people had watercraft to get to the fucking western coast. You're telling me they just burnt their boats on land and forgot how to build boats to get to, especially at the end of the Pleistocene, where the water levels were lowered. You can fucking damn near see Cuba from Yucatan. I don't buy that. It's incredible. You think they got to a very cruise and burnt their boats there?
00:26:00
Speaker
possibly, yes. But I think people have been here much longer, just the environment here, so tropical and acidic. And there's also not much of a stone tool industry, but I'm not sure if it's because people aren't looking for it, because the cores of these islands are metamorphic by nature, they're volcanic. So there are those good stone tool materials present in the interiors. Now the outline parts of these islands are these limestone Pleistocene corals.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, it just seems like if you can see the Bahamas from Florida, I feel like you could island hop and see islands the whole way down to anywhere in the Antilles. Exactly. It doesn't seem like it's a stretch to say that people have been there for a long time. Like you said, if they don't understand the indigenous culture, how are they going to understand, let alone the prehistoric 10,000-year-old kind of stuff on there?
00:26:50
Speaker
New South, the company I used to work for in Georgia, got super lucky and got a contract to dig a ball court in Puerto Rico. That blew my mind. I was talking to my boss about it too, who went down there and
00:27:02
Speaker
There's just so much Mayan and like Yucatan influence in there. Like not that the Mayans were colonizing that area, but like that ball court culture and like that kind of just like it spread across the Caribbean. Apparently this ball courts all over the Caribbean, which is. So there are three ball courts within a five mile radius of where I am right now. Like they're all over the Dominican and Haiti.
00:27:22
Speaker
doing the same kind of hit ball game that the Mayans were doing at the time of European contact. So there's definitely, I think there's heavy influence coming in from Central America here in the Greater Antilles. I just don't know about the Lesser Antilles or what's going on in the Bahamas and those outlying islands to the Northeast that are closer to Florida.
00:27:39
Speaker
but it is literally the American Mediterranean here. The fucking Mississippi River Delta ends up just north and you have a major river delta in Venezuela entering out and you have the Yucatan. People are getting here and there's trade goods coming in all the way from fucking Montana and the Great Lakes as well as from the fucking Andes.
00:28:02
Speaker
Definitely. It only makes sense that they were all like they were boat folks and moving around and interacting. I mean, I think that that only makes sense and influencing each other and interacting as different cultures and whatnot. But I mean, I think that would be really cool to kind of trace that interaction and see how it goes. But it seems like if they don't have an archaeologist on the island or, you know, or anywhere else in there, it's hard to make those connections and really study
Treasure Hunters vs. Cultural Preservation
00:28:30
Speaker
it.
00:28:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that, and then you also have the treasure hunters, which are actually a huge problem here. Like the day before we were supposed to leave here, the treasure hunters sent a letter to Indiana University claiming that what we were doing was in violation of a bunch of shit that we were acting without university approval, but then rather having the treasure hunter prove his bullshit, we had to prove he was lying.
00:28:49
Speaker
which was because he had no proof. We're taking these sites away from them to create protective parks, and they're not happy about it. The Ministry of Culture wants to work with archaeologists to protect their resources, because what they see with IU, we're taking a bunch of materials with us back to Indiana, conserving them, getting them ready, and then bringing them back to the DR. Rather than this 50-50 split they're used to, they're getting to 100%. Now granted, some then end up walking out
00:29:19
Speaker
later down the road, but the treasure hunters aren't getting a cut. So it's like a really weird environment to do this kind of work because it's not just the random arrowhead hunters. It is these very large and financially backed institutions that were fundamentally cutting their bottom line away from them. So they made a deal with the treasure hunters, like traders. What do you mean?
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah, he said earlier that they do a 50-50 split where they'll make these contracts with these guys and give them half the stuff, and the government gets half the stuff and the money, so it's an embedded part of this. Concha Club.
00:30:02
Speaker
It's, it's not great. So it's been interesting to navigate this environment because I'm like, what the fuck? And I hear these stories of like at conferences, treasure hunters, like approaching our members of my team or other stark algae teams from, um, the Carolinas trying to start fist fights over it because they're like, you're, you know, we're taking away their profession, but they're, they're just after the shit. They're just after the artifacts. Whereas we're also not only just preserving these artifacts, but also protecting marine ecosystems.
00:30:30
Speaker
It wouldn't surprise me if those are connected into larger black markets too. So like you really could be starting to mess with like mobs, gangs. Yeah. As you get like really deeper into this stuff. Like if you start cutting the bottom line, you know, it seems a little dangerous. There's a lot of the same families here in the Caribbean that are in some of the larger East coast crime syndicates. No, a lot of Italians.
00:30:57
Speaker
I mean, they were the first to sail there, I guess. I saw when the Spanish were, especially when they were pulling stuff out of Sarah de Pazzi in Argentina, one ship that went back to Spain occasionally had enough money to pay for the entire coffers of the kingdom of England for an entire year, which is why the queen was like, Francis Drake, go get that money. Go sink those ships. So all of that money, Spain was just extorting the fuck out of the new world.
00:31:26
Speaker
and taking all that gold back in silver. So like in our country, we don't really have a lot of that. So like it's just like Clovis points are on the black market. I'm hopefully not human bones. I'm sure they are. But like in the Caribbean, it's like pretty clear just from like knowing only superficially about it. When you're treasure hunting, it's like pounds of like silver and doubloons and things like that, which I'm sure has all been
00:31:51
Speaker
picked clean from the immediate ones you can see, but Carlton, I don't know. Do you know about that from school? Yeah. I mean, like I showed you guys that picture of the fucking brick of concrete Spanish silver. And there's a lot of it that, you know, that's, that's the kind of thing that people are looking for the shipwrecks. And so like the one that we're working on next week, so the students go home tomorrow and then the staff are staying. So it's going to be much more team. We're going to do like actually much more active
00:32:17
Speaker
excavations at this mid 15th, 16th century shipwreck. And that's where we found, oh, I have it right here. You get my room, we pulled out fucking 50 horseshoes the other day. Carlton not only bent over to pull up an artifact, but it was dripping wet.
00:32:37
Speaker
What the fuck? I have a Gatorade cooler in here full of salt water that I have a shitload of horseshoes in. Horseshoes? When this also ties into the horses' human society shit, I'm also down here looking for the earliest horses that got to the Americas.
00:32:58
Speaker
It's hard, but we don't know the name of the ship. The treasure hunters got to it. They don't know the name of it, but we know it's a mid-15th century ship based on some typologies. It had cast iron bombard cannons, or not cast iron, sorry, wrought iron. Those are early caroubles. They didn't know how to cast iron. They're firing fucking granite cannonballs. The whole thing is not. Wait, mid-15th century being like 1400s?
00:33:22
Speaker
sorry, mid 16th century. So mid 1500s. So it's an early ship, not quite the galleons yet, but we don't know the name of the ship. There's a couple, like a lot of ships went down here, like a lot. It's not just like reading a book, trying to figure out like, okay, what ship is this? But we just know generally this ship is from the mid 1500s. We don't know which one, but we do know like they wrecked by hitting a coral reef.
00:33:45
Speaker
Then you can see that they try to drop both of their anchors and then they also try to drop their holy shit third anchor to really stop them and it didn't hit the reef. A fucking ship carried 17 anchors at any given time. There was a rule in the Spanish government, you had to have 17 anchors under ship.
00:34:02
Speaker
Well, a lot of them were kept in the bottom as ballast, but then they also just needed extra anchors in case shit happened. So we know the treasure hunters, they left their fucking stakes there, but we don't think they hit the entire site. So next week, what we're doing, well, tomorrow and in the next couple of days is we're going to go start excavating actual excavations outside of where we know based on how these ships are oriented. We know where the anchors are, we know where the ballast stones and the anchors are, but there's a
00:34:30
Speaker
after half of the ship that hasn't been found. So that's what we're going to try to figure out. And that might have the bell on it, which will have the name of the ship and maybe some of the more like actual, we can tell what the, what this thing was fucking carrying, but they're carrying a lot of fucking horseshoes. I'll tell you that. Like that's something that we find. So did they have horses? We don't know, but that's wild. Um, I'm going to drop all 17 anchors on this segment and, uh, right here. So we will be right back.
00:34:56
Speaker
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00:35:24
Speaker
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00:35:31
Speaker
Hey podcast fans, I've got to talk to you about drinking water. As an archaeologist, I've been on surveys where we had to drink three to five liters of water every day. That's 1.3 gallons, just to basically not die. Sometimes that water just doesn't hydrate you as quickly as you're using it. That's why we've partnered with Liquid Ivy. The small packets make it easy to take one with you to work, to work out, or on any adventure. I like the strawberry lemonade and lemon lime one's the best.
00:35:55
Speaker
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00:36:22
Speaker
Yeah. But other than the scientific dives we had, we've had done a couple
Diving Experiences and Safety
00:36:25
Speaker
of fun things. We did site maintenance, which we talked about of repairing all the buoys and making the dive area safe because they're just gone and they're not being kept up. But we did a night dive last night for the bio folks. They want to see these corals spawn. So I mean, we all just went in with flashlights, but like we got in there before the sun went down. So you're just like in the water as it just turns pitch black and they have flashlights. It was like some of the coolest shit, like the whole ocean floor changed.
00:36:50
Speaker
It's like all the eels were out, there was crabs fucking, all the clothes were fully out like doing their thing. They're like, watched a Moray eel fucking get a fish and like wrap around it. I was like, holy shit. No, it was just incredible. And then there's a lot of bioluminescence. So if you strip the stand, like all these blue glows happen. So that's just been incredible. Did you almost get attacked by a Manaree?
00:37:15
Speaker
an eagle ray. Yes. That was a couple of days ago. And I had missed it because like on that day during the site maintenance, I was just, I was lionfish hunting because lionfish are in base and they're all over the site. So I just took a spear gun and I was fucking slang lionfish left and right. I was having a blast because they don't move. And then we had this special tube in them because they're still venomous that we put them in. I ended up with like a decent amount of lionfish.
00:37:38
Speaker
But when you're down in the first dive, my buddy Keegan, dive buddy Keegan, was like, did you see that eagle ray that went right behind us? Because there's this reef wall that we're at, and that's where the lionfish are. So behind us is just open ocean. I missed it. But then on the second dive, as we're going through the reef, all of a sudden, it got really
00:37:54
Speaker
hard to see. Like there's a lot of sediment built up and I thought someone might have just like kicked the ocean floor, but it was like really weird. Like I couldn't figure it out because I couldn't see anybody around. And as I'm, as I'm swimming over the disturbed sediment, like I'm pretty close to the forest, I see this tail start moving up towards me and it has this fucking Steve Irwin Annihilator just pointed at my chest and I was like, it was at this moment that he knew he fucked up. Yes.
00:38:22
Speaker
I immediately kicked up, inflated my BCD a bit to get me out of the way. And then once I was able to clear, I could see this massive like 10 foot wingspan eagle ray that had embedded in the sand to hunt. And I had just dumb ass again, swam right over it and it upset it. And I was like, it was like one of the coolest things in my life. And we brought the photographer in and I'm like, take fucking pictures of this. Cause it was just incredible. It was like how massive that thing was and how close I came to just getting fucking shanked by a stingray.
00:38:51
Speaker
Those things are nothing to joke around about, man. Those stingrays, they took the best of us. RIP. Like I've seen skates, like the little dinner plate little fuckers, but I'm like 10 foot wingspan. This thing was massive. I was just super impressed. And every time I go in here to do that archaeological work, you know, we had that conversation with Mattie McAllister way back when, of like, when you go into these marine environments, like it's not shark ship to worry about. It's
00:39:16
Speaker
air consumption, it's your diet buddies, and it's a lot of other local organisms that you have to be careful about. Like during one of the dives the other night, one of our diet masters had her hand on a coral to kind of brace herself in a surge. A surge is where you kind of get rocked back and forth. So a current will push you one way, but a surge will rock you.
00:39:34
Speaker
Everyone else saw this moray eel that was below her and it started to coil up And they were able to get her hand out of the way in time because those things have two sets of teeth So the main jaw the frangel jaw all their teeth point backwards and they're fucking nasty like Komodo dragons where their mouths are just have so much shit in them that um They'll fuck you up pretty good There's a guy who was part of this team like last year. He got his hand fucked up at severed his artery and
00:39:58
Speaker
and they had a tourniquet underwater. I don't know what they were doing where they came prepared with fucking tourniquets. I don't have a tourniquet anywhere on my equipment. Do you guys bring a first aid kit down with you? We have one on the boat. In order to get dive master, you have to be underwater rescue certified. We have eight people at any given time who know what the fuck's going on when it comes to health and safety of the site, of the people.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's intense and then always monitoring water. That's always like I'm chugging water all the time when I'm on the boat. It's like counterintuitive because you're in salt water, so you're getting dehydrated constantly. But you think like, oh, I don't have to drink water or anything like that, but dehydration is a very real thing. It seems like as part of... How do you pee for drinking that much water? So that's why I don't tuck my wetsuit into my boots. So I don't fill up my boots with piss. I just piss in the ocean.
00:40:50
Speaker
And then when I'm getting off, when I'm getting off the boat or getting back on the boat, I kind of like unzip my blip suit in the back pretty preparedly to try to get all that stuff out. But I'm not in a dry suit. I'm in a wetsuit. But like that was one of the first tips. Like one of the students here, Jenna, she's like, don't tuck your wetsuit into your boots or else you're just going to fill your boots with piss. We got boots full of piss.
00:41:11
Speaker
So it's one of those things. And I had to learn, especially I was eating breakfast really heavily here. And I learned that was a no, no. Because I was just getting bloated. Because we're at this all inclusive place where you have all this food. And so I had to start especially getting dehydrated, getting a loose stool. So I've just been eating fucking raisin bran every morning, like bowls of raisin bran. So I don't get bloated. I don't get more oxygen. And I'm not potentially letting out shitting my wetsuit.
00:41:39
Speaker
That's important. So you mentioned something in the interim, in the green room. Are all three of us and Jacob Arnz and Shoutout play this game called Sea of Thieves at an attics level? I don't think we're at David and Zelda level, but we play it a lot.
00:42:01
Speaker
But you did use some of your Sea of Thieves knowledge to save you. Do you mind recounting that story? Yeah, so we get back. We usually get back around two o'clock so we can make time for lunch. And then we have about two hours off before we need to reconvene, get reports written, do our reports and presentations, and figure out the game plan for the next day.
00:42:24
Speaker
And so today, one of the students who had taken sailing classes, like there's sailboats here and you can just rent them for like 30 minutes for free. So that's what we did. So I went out with three of the students and we did really well. We were really impressed, but she had kept the wind and the way the wind flow was following the shoreline. So we just kind of sued it away from the resort. And then we had to turn back and got to this dead stop and she didn't know what she was doing.
00:42:47
Speaker
And I was trying to tell her, I know I don't sail, but I know we need to take this other angle to take us away from the resort, but it'll take us for an hour to see that we can then turn the sail again and we can have a better hypotenuse. And we just have to do this kind of zigzag pattern. She wasn't hearing it. She refused. So we get to the dead stop, the boat stop. We're going over the buoys into the fucking public swimming area. We're
00:43:09
Speaker
getting people yelling at us. So I like hop off the boat and I'm turning the boat myself so it can catch sail and go. And of course the second I do that, the fucking boat just takes off and leaves. And they can't stop it. They're letting out the line to have the sail kind of drop. And it's just fucking gone. And the speed boat comes up to rescue everybody. Cause like we were beyond time and they're trying to get me in the boat. I'm like, no, I'm just fucking swimming to shore. Like I have a life jacket on. I just fucking breaststroke back to shore. Cause I'm like, I'm done with this adventure.
00:43:38
Speaker
So I waited for them because like he, when he tied them up, I thought he was going to slowly bring them to shore. No, no, no. They're basically on like a fucking, like one of those inflatable tubes and he just fucking was whipping them. And I heard them screaming as they're being towed on this little catamaran and it's just going all over the place.
00:43:57
Speaker
Holy shit. Like I'm so glad I'm not on that boat with those girls, but I had this, like the second that boat started just, just took off and I'm just stuck there. It was this moment of like, that we see in this game where like, if you fall off the ship, the ship's not stopping. It just has to keep going. And I'm like, I'm fucking left here. And there's no artificial mermaid to take me back, like spot me back.
00:44:16
Speaker
I'm in the middle of the ocean by myself, so I need to ... This is not fucking fun of a game, so I just slammed it short, and then made it in time for my deep tissue massage at five o'clock, and that was out.
00:44:30
Speaker
That's funny cuz the mechanism in the game is like if you fall off the ship, which you do frequently There's this mermaid that brings you back and you know, you can always make it. It's not like a death sentence That's the first thing I think fall quite a bit like Jacob. Yeah Jacob arts in our our boy
00:44:47
Speaker
So, but all in all, it's been really interesting.
Interdisciplinary Inspiration and Collaboration
00:44:49
Speaker
It's really kind of pushed me to think differently about archaeology, especially in the context of, I really like this living museum concept, these like interdisciplinary field schools where you get these different scholars to work together. And I'm like trying to see how you can translate that to a terrestrial context, right? Because we think about Cahokia and Mesa Verde, some of these big sites where like the landscape is managed specifically to
00:45:09
Speaker
promote the beauty of the archaeology whereas here the cannons are being overtaken by corals and are actively becoming part of this underwater environment. So I've been thinking how do we bring this or develop a terrestrial field school that will bring in wildlife biologists and other people to see how these landscapes, these modern day natural landscapes can be protected and help reinforce protections for cultural landscapes.
00:45:33
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And especially because all the other sciences in the world are better funded than we are currently. So if you have funding mechanisms and coming from multiple places, it seems like that is the way to go for the future. And archaeology, terrestrial archaeologists can use soil scientists, biologists. I mean, we can use a bunch of other disciplines and work with a bunch of other disciplines to really do that. And they can give us money.
00:45:58
Speaker
I think that's a great idea. Hopefully, we can find a way to work that into your future research when you're diving lakes in Nebraska. I did my defense down here, which you guys talked about at the beginning. I had to defend from the Dominican Republic. During my presentation, I did that horseshoe bit with them. I was like, what we're doing down here with continuing this horse research,
00:46:19
Speaker
and I pulled out a horseshoe. And they're like, what the fuck are you doing in the Caribbean? Like, you're a Plains archeologist. Like, none of us understand what you're doing down there. Are you distracted? Like, get your fucking head in the game. It just got like roasted, just to me to do like a fun bit of like, here's a fucking horseshoe that's covered in shells. And they're like, fucking stop. It was like, it backfired, but Will Taylor thought it was funny. He was like, okay. He's like, we need to talk about that horseshoe later. I'm like, yeah, we do. But like, everyone else is like, you work in Nebraska. Like, what the fuck is going on?
00:46:46
Speaker
Well, I think it makes sense. I mean, you have to expand and get better at archaeology. You can't just stay in one place and do the same thing over and over again. I mean, you're not going to use new techniques or something if you just stay in the same place and do the same shit over and over again. Yeah. And my museum has partnered with some of these Dominican folks. So we're helping them develop exhibits, curatorial practices. So I am actually down here doing work. And I'm very fortunate that the underwater scientists and the archaeologists here choose
00:47:13
Speaker
Also, Carlton's going to get us a grant to come down there and do all this research too. So he told us we're committing it to the podcast that he said he's going to do it. The amount of friends I have now, they're like, Hey, by the way, I'm Scuba certified. I'm like, okay, bet you are.
00:47:29
Speaker
But no, there's a lot of work that needs to be done here. And there's so much room that people are actively demanding more and more help. And it's atrocious that the underwater archaeology lab in San Domingo is in the former prison of the former dictator. It's this tiny-ass building. There's open tanks outside that have fish in them to keep the mosquitoes down. These things just aren't being taken care of because they just don't have the funding. And they want help. And they're desperate for it.
00:47:58
Speaker
They're tired of being taken advantage of by treasure hunters and they want to preserve these things, but it's part of a really weird economy where you have to slick the hands of even the tour guides because if you're not paying them off to take their tour guides to the museum. There's this amazing nautical museum that gets less than 80 people to visit a month and it's right next to where they drop off tourists. It's like trying to figure out a system that promotes and protects cultural heritage in very much a country that's dominated by tourism.
00:48:26
Speaker
It's difficult. But on that note, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to, uh, let me talk about my experience on
Closing Remarks and Reflections
00:48:31
Speaker
the podcast. I'm excited to get back next week and get back in recording and talk about some, some more stuff that we do. So with that, I'll turn it over to you guys. Well, appreciate it. Carlton. Love you. It's really cool to hear what he's doing. Cause I've never actually met anybody that's done Caribbean. I mean, we met met quote Maddie in Australia, but I mean, that's like a different country. Well, I guess that was the Dominican Republic, but we're pretty much linked to the Caribbean here. Yeah. It's pretty interesting.
00:48:54
Speaker
Well, I think we're all fascinated by it, too. I think it's something that unites us as our love of sailing and kind of like the pirate culture and all those sort of things. I mean, those are some of our best episodes, the ones where we nerd out about that stuff because we are really super passionate about it and care about it and think it's interesting.
00:49:09
Speaker
So hopefully we'll keep talking about this and keep learning from Carlton as he keeps going along and doing this. Thank you all for listening to us. Once again, I'm gonna reiterate what we said at the beginning. Check out the NRHP bulletin posted by the National Park Service if you want the real criteria. Don't listen to us. Thank you to all the people who told us that we're dumb. We appreciate you. Thank you for all for listening to the podcast. I think this is the point where David says that like rate review,
00:49:37
Speaker
Guys, just rate and review the podcast. Like we really need it on Apple for sure. Donnie, I appreciate you doing so. I think you did. If you listen on Spotify, I don't remember your, your listener. Yeah, guys, please rate and review the podcast helps us do well. If you listen on Spotify, I'm not sure how to do it, but
00:49:52
Speaker
always leave a comment on our Instagram or shoot us a well thought out email saying that you can't stand the way Carlton talks. It's fun. Maybe we shouldn't just add that guy out. We'll cut that back out. You guys can send us an email saying what you like and don't like about the podcast. It'd be great. All right, turn it over. And Connor, would you live a life in underwater ruins? Yes. I might too. Depends on how much air I get. Well, get to drink beer and speak a lot of Spanish. I probably would do it.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's your dream. I mean, I got with Mosquito. Also, we have a Redbubble store, so please go buy stuff. No one's bought anything in 10 years. So, you know, Redbubble.com slash people slash a life in ruins podcast. I think it's just life in ruins. Either way, get some stickers. Shoot me a DM. If you want stickers, I'll get you some. Or shoot Carlton a DM, I should say. Anyway, Carlton's waiting for us in the green room because he's loaded back in. We will talk to him soon. And bye.
00:50:56
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. David has a joke he says. Yeah. What do you call dogs smaller than labs?
00:51:21
Speaker
cats because you basically should just get a cat i phrase that badly you know what's a joke you know it's funny dogs that are smaller than labs just get a real dog all right bye
00:51:51
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.