UPDATE: September/October 1999
Excavation during these slow months continued with new interns and a drive to complete Unit 2. With the campground closed and the hurricane season upon us, visitation dropped to near zero. The general sort of the faunal material sample was completed and sent to the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History. While under study, the collection was used by the Museum in a learning and educational program with school groups. On the 10th of September special visitors from the University of the Virgin Island's Center for Eastern Caribbean Culture were provided a tour of the site and the artifacts recovered.
For a week in October, thirty-one volunteers from Elderhostel worked at clearing vegetation, mapping and drawing the historic ruins at Cinnamon Bay.
They also searched for historic structures at the Lameshur Plantation. At Lameshur, four platforms of the workers houses were found in the dense vegetation below the Great House. The walls of these buildings must have long ago deteriorated as no trace of them was found, however no subsurface testing was undertaken.
Searching through the bush at Cinnamon, the volunteers located five historic adult graves and two children's grave sites that were probably those of past estate owners. They removed vegetation from a structure that has been tentatively identified as the house servant's quarters and another building that was possibly the gatehouse. They also cleared around an historic stone animal pen.
.
\
On the 19th of October, Mr. Tyson's Caribbean History Class of Eudora Kean High School of St. Thomas participated at the dig. Twenty-seven students learned about the site at Cinnamon Bay and how it plays a significant role in understanding the peoples of the Virgin Islands at the time Columbus arrived into the New World. During the day, as the students worked at the site, one of the students Kiana E. Baron (center above) while course screening materials from Unit-4, Level-7, 60-70 centimeters below the surface, found to her great surprise, a clay zemi.
On the 28th, the Danish Minister of Culture and the Danish Ambassador visited the site and reviewed some of the artifacts that have been recovered.
This page updated November 17, 1999