Recent research in Cuba has highlighted the contrast between European and ancient American values. Cheap brass dress accessories from Western Europe traded for many times their price in gold with Caribbean natives who prized the alloy more than the pure metal.

“It would have been impossible for the first Europeans arriving in the Caribbean to envisage the colossal value that their metal would accomplish in trade with the indigenous population,” write Marcos Martin-ón-Torres and his colleagues in the Journal of Archaeological Science. “Early chroniclers report that pure gold or caona was considered the least valuable metal, significantly less esteemed and less sacred than copper-based alloys.”

As a result, burials in the Contact-period TaÍno cemetery of El Chorro de MaÍta, in the Banes area of northeastern Cuba, contained many more grave goods of nonprecious metal than of gold, and both TaÍno and Spaniard seem to have been happy with their commercial transactions. More than 120 burials were excavated, and distinctive grave goods appeared to mark different ranks in local society as well as specialised craftsmen.

“It was probably this scenario of societies with increasing social stratification that Columbus encountered when he first arrived in eastern Cuba in 1492,” the authors say.

The most common artefact type in the graves was “a thin metallic tube with an average length of 29mm (just over an inch) and 2mm in diameter, with a slightly tapered profile, produced by rolling a thin metal sheet. These tubes seemed ideal as pendants, as they would allow for a thread to be sewn into and knotted at the distal end. Some of them still preserve cotton remains,” the investigators say. The tubes were found near the neck, chest, abdomen and knee of different burials, suggesting they were worn in a variety of ways.

Analysis at the Institute of Archaeology in London confirmed that several different and complex alloys were present in the grave goods, including a ternary gold-silver-copper alloy probably imported from Colombia by trade up the island chain of the West Indies. “We hoped to offer fresh insight into the supply, value and use of different alloys among the TaÍno, as well as into the use of metals in the symbolic perpetuation of social ranks,” the team says.

Analysis of the tiny metal tubes showed them all to be of brass, with about 80 per cent of copper and 15-20 per cent of zinc, as well as tiny amounts of lead, nickel, iron and tin. The metal had been cold-worked and annealed, then cut with a sharp tool before being rolled.

The composition strongly resembles that of brasses produced in Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, notably in Nuremberg. “In all likelihood these tubes are not beads but lacetags or aglets from European clothing. From the 15th century onwards these were used to prevent the ends of laces from fraying, and to ease threading in the points for fastening doublets and hose,” the investigators say.

The Spanish sought gold: the TaÍno had it, but esteemed it little. The Spanish had brass, bought cheaply for practical purposes. Rarely can any exchange have been so mutually satisfactory, or so far-reaching in its eventual outcome.
Journal of Archaeological Science 34: 194-204.

Elizabethan grotto

Britain’s oldest garden grotto has been excavated in the grounds of a Surrey mansion. Built in the reign of Elizabeth I as part of an elaborate Renaissance layout, it was decorated with mineral specimens and seashells; the Queen herself visited the estate on many occasions to enjoy its French-inspired splendours.

The grotto was built at Carew Manor in Beddington around 1570 by “that delicate knight, Sir Francis Carew”, a bachelor courtier who died in 1611 at the age of 81. Eleven years earlier he had surprised the old Queen by serving her fresh cherries, the ripening of which he had retarded by using a canvas awning over the tree. He also created a famous orangery at Beddington, with winter shelters for the trees based on continental examples.

His ingenuity extended to garden design, as foreign visitors remarked. A retainer of the Landgrave of Hesse saw “a fine fountain with neatly made fishes, frogs etc swimming in the fountain as if they were alive”, and “a beautiful pleasure house, artificially built with all kinds of shells. Inside, an animal with many heads with jets of water issuing forth”.

Sir Roy Strong has remarked that the “fishes and frogs” might well have been inspired by Bernard Palissy’s grotto for Constable Montmorency at Ecouen, near Paris, and that Carew’s entire pleasure garden, using the River Wandle to create its streams and fountains, “must have been an almost unique experience in Elizabethan England”.

While the ultimate inspiration was Italian, Strong believes that the proximate source of the scheme lay in France, at places such as Chenonceaux, Fontainebleau, and Bastie, where shellwork grottos and garden temples were built from the 1540s.

It is a fragment of just such a grotto that the Carshalton and District History and Archaeology Society has now uncovered at Beddington, John Phillips reports in the London Archaeologist. “The structure consisted of mortar into which a mass of decorative material had been set, largely on the inside,” he says. This material included large, knobbly, often elongated flints, which projected into the interior of the structure to give the effect of a cave, which “had obviously been brought directly from the quarry”, along with ferrous conglomerate and a little tufa, ranging in colour from pale brown to dark red.

There were also pieces of mottled red and grey marble, probably Belgian in origin and perhaps offcuts from the London tomb-making trade. Dark sparkling amphibolite and sparkling mica-rich schist “are not local and must have come from Cornwall, Scotland, Brittany or some more distant source”. Other sparkles in torchlight were provided by geodes, their cavities lined with calcite and quartz crystals.

Abalone shells, with their mother-of-pearl lining, were used, brought from Cornwall or the Channel Islands, and “there were many other shells, some local such as cockles, others from tropical sources which are awaiting identification”. There were eight pieces of tropical coral, which since they came from a variety of habitats probably came from a dealer.
London Archaeologist Vol. 11 No. 7: 185-191.

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